Multiple temperatures and melting of a colloidal active crystal

Abstract

Thermal fluctuations constantly excite all relaxation modes in an equilibrium crystal. As the temperature rises, these fluctuations promote the formation of defects and eventually melting. In active solids, the self-propulsion of “atomic” units provides an additional source of non-equilibrium fluctuations whose effect on the melting scenario is still largely unexplored. Here we show that when a colloidal crystal is activated by a bath of swimming bacteria, solvent temperature and active temperature cooperate to define dynamic and thermodynamic properties. Our system consists of repulsive paramagnetic particles confined in two dimensions and immersed in a bath of light-driven E. coli. The relative balance between fluctuations and interactions can be adjusted in two ways: by changing the strength of the magnetic field and by tuning activity with light. When the persistence time of active fluctuations is short, a single effective temperature controls both the amplitudes of relaxation modes and the melting transition. For more persistent active noise, energy equipartition is broken and multiple temperatures emerge, whereas melting occurs before the Lindemann parameter reaches its equilibrium critical value. We show that this phenomenology is fully confirmed by numerical simulations and framed within a minimal model of a single active particle in a periodic potential.