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Wetting Transition of Active Brownian Particles on a Thin Membrane
Physical Review Letters  (IF9.161),  Pub Date : 2021-12-01, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.127.238002
Francesco Turci, Nigel B. Wilding

We study nonequilibrium analogues of surface phase transitions in a minimal model of active particles in contact with a purely repulsive potential barrier that mimics a thin porous membrane. Under conditions of bulk motility-induced phase separation, the interaction strength ${ϵ}_{w}$ of the barrier controls the affinity of the dense phase for the barrier region. We uncover clear signatures of a wetting phase transition as ${ϵ}_{w}$ is varied. In common with its equilibrium counterpart, the character of this transition depends on the system dimensionality: a continuous transition with large density fluctuations and gas bubbles is uncovered in 2D while 3D systems exhibit a sharp transition absent of large correlations.