Active matter under control: Insights from response theory

Understand

Active constituents burn fuel to sustain individual motion, giving rise to collective effects that are not seen in systems at thermal equilibrium, such as phase separation with purely repulsive interactions.

• There is a great potential in harnessing the striking phenomenology of active matter to build novel controllable and responsive materials that surpass passive ones.
• Yet, we currently lack a systematic roadmap to predict the protocols driving active systems between different states in a way that is thermodynamically optimal.
• Equilibrium thermodynamics is an inadequate foundation to this end, due to the dissipation rate arising from the constant fuel consumption in active matter.