Ideal bulk pressure of active Brownian particles

Abstract

The extent to which active matter might be described by effective equilibrium concepts like temperature and pressure is currently being discussed intensely. Here, we study the simplest model, an ideal gas of noninteracting active Brownian particles. While the mechanical pressure exerted onto confining walls has been linked to correlations between particles' positions and their orientations, we show that these correlations are entirely controlled by boundary effects. We also consider a definition of local pressure, which describes interparticle forces in terms of momentum exchange between different regions of the system. We present three pieces of analytical evidence which indicate that such a local pressure exists, and we show that its bulk value differs from the mechanical pressure exerted on the walls of the system. We attribute this difference to the fact that the local pressure in the bulk does not depend on boundary effects, contrary to the mechanical pressure. We carefully examine these boundary effects using a channel geometry, and we show a virial formula for the pressure correctly predicts the mechanical pressure even in finite channels. However, this result no longer holds in more complex geometries, as exemplified for a channel that includes circular obstacles.