Issue |
EPL
Volume 143, Number 1, July 2023
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 17004 | |
Number of page(s) | 7 | |
Section | Biological and soft matter physics | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/acdf1b | |
Published online | 28 June 2023 |
Dead or alive: Distinguishing active from passive particles using supervised learning(a)
1 Department of Applied Physics, Eindhoven University of Technology - P.O. Box 513, NL-5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
2 Institute for Complex Molecular Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology - P.O. Box 513, NL-5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
3 Laboratoire de Physique de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, ENS, Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Université de Paris - F-75005 Paris, France
(c) E-mail: l.m.c.janssen@tue.nl (corresponding author)
(d) E-mail: simoneciarella@gmail.com (corresponding author)
Received: 16 February 2023
Accepted: 16 June 2023
A longstanding open question in the field of dense disordered matter is how precisely structure and dynamics are related to each other. With the advent of machine learning, it has become possible to agnostically predict the dynamic propensity of a particle in a dense liquid based on its local structural environment. Thus far, however, these machine-learning studies have focused almost exclusively on simple liquids composed of passive particles. Here we consider a mixture of both passive and active (i.e., self-propelled) Brownian particles, with the aim to identify the active particles from minimal local structural information. We compare a state-of-the-art machine learning approach for passive systems with a new method we develop based on Voronoi tessellation. Both methods accurately identify the active particles based on their structural properties at high activity and low concentrations of active particles. Our Voronoi method is, however, substantially faster to train and deploy because it requires fewer, and easy to compute, input features. Notably, both become ineffective when the activity is low, suggesting a fundamentally different structural signature for dynamic propensity and non-equilibrium activity. Ultimately, these efforts might also find relevance in the context of biological active glasses such as confluent cell layers, where subtle changes in the microstructure can hint at pathological changes in cell dynamics.
© 2023 The author(s)
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