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Area of Science:

  • Soft Matter Physics
  • Active Matter Systems
  • Polymer Science

Background:

  • Self-organization is a key phenomenon in active matter.
  • Understanding the interplay between particle geometry and collective behavior is crucial.
  • Previous studies have not fully explored entanglement's role in active ring systems.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how orientational order and geometric entanglement in active ring suspensions are affected by density and confinement.
  • To quantify ring entanglement and orientational order using novel metrics.
  • To identify the self-organized states emerging in active ring systems.

Main Methods:

  • Introduction of the 'wrapping number' to quantify pairwise ring interpenetration.
  • Characterization of orientational order via alignment of normal vectors to osculating planes.
  • Mutual-information analysis to determine correlations between alignment and wrapping number.

Main Results:

  • Both wrapping number and alignment differentiate active from passive systems.
  • A significant correlation exists between ring alignment and wrapping number in active conditions.
  • Self-organization shows nonmonotonic dependence on entanglement: moderate wrapping stabilizes contacts, while excessive entanglement disrupts alignment.

Conclusions:

  • A competition between entanglement and alignment exists, driven by the need for planar conformations for stacking.
  • The findings suggest that out-of-equilibrium effects can regulate entanglement in polymer systems.
  • This microscopic mechanism may have broader implications for understanding self-organization in various soft matter systems.