From a microscopic inertial active matter model to the Schrödinger equation

Abstract

Active field theories, such as the paradigmatic model known as ‘active model B+’, are simple yet very powerful tools for describing phenomena such as motility-induced phase separation. No comparable theory has been derived yet for the underdamped case. In this work, we introduce active model I+, an extension of active model B+ to particles with inertia. The governing equations of active model I+ are systematically derived from the microscopic Langevin equations. We show that, for underdamped active particles, thermodynamic and mechanical definitions of the velocity field no longer coincide and that the density-dependent swimming speed plays the role of an effective viscosity. Moreover, active model I+ contains an analog of the Schrödinger equation in Madelung form as a limiting case, allowing one to find analoga of the quantum-mechanical tunnel effect and of fuzzy dark matter in active fluids. We investigate the active tunnel effect analytically and via numerical continuation.