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Published on: December 4, 2017
Configurational entropy and effective temperature in systems of active Brownian particles
Zdeněk Preisler1, Marjolein Dijkstra1
1Soft Condensed Matter, Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC Utrecht, The Netherlands. M.Dijkstra@uu.nl.
Abstract:
We propose a method to determine the effective density of states and configurational entropy in systems of active Brownian particles by measuring the probability distribution function of potential energy at varying temperatures. Assuming that the entropy is a continuous and monotonically increasing function of energy, we provide support that two-dimensional systems of purely repulsive active Brownian spheres can be mapped onto an equilibrium system with a Boltzmann-like distribution and an effective temperature. We find that the effective temperature depends even for a large number of particles on system size, suggesting that active systems are non-extensive. In addition, the effective Helmholtz free energy can be derived from the configurational entropy. We verify our results regarding the configurational entropy by using thermodynamic integration of the effective Helmholtz free energy with respect to temperature.
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