Dresden 2026 – scientific programme
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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik
DY 33: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems I (joint session DY/BP)
DY 33.2: Talk
Wednesday, March 11, 2026, 09:45–10:00, ZEU/0114
Phase separation in a mixture of proliferating and motile active matter — Lukas Hupe1, Joanna M. Materska2, David Zwicker1, Ramin Golestanian1,3, Bartlomiej Waclaw2,4, and •Philip Bittihn1 — 1MPI for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany — 2Dioscuri Centre for Physics and Chemistry of Bacteria, Institute of Physical Chemistry, Warsaw, Poland — 3Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford, United Kingdom — 4School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Proliferation and motility are ubiquitous drivers of activity in biological systems. Here, we study a dense binary mixture of motile and proliferating particles with exclusively repulsive interactions, where homeostasis in the proliferating subpopulation is maintained by pressure-induced removal. Using large-scale simulations, we show that this heterogeneous active matter undergoes spontaneous phase separation at high density and weak enough self-propulsion. We recapitulate this behavior using an effective Active Brownian Particle model that incorporates the emergent effects of the proliferating matrix on motile particles: enhanced diffusion, renormalized self-propulsion, reduced persistence, and an effective attraction between motile particles. Our results establish a new type of phase transition and reveal how mechanical activity from growth can mediate non-equilibrium interactions and fluctuations. This mechanism provides a conceptual framework to reinterpret the physics of dense pattern-forming cellular populations, such as bacterial colonies or tumors, as systems of mixed active matter.
Keywords: phase separation; Active Brownian Particles; effective models; mean-squared displacements; proliferation