Time scales of inertial motion in the collective dynamics of underdamped active phase field crystal systems

Abstract: Many active matter systems, mostly on the microscopic scale, are well approximated as overdamped, meaning that any inertial momentum is immediately dissipated by the environment. On the other hand, especially for macroscopic active systems but also for many mesoscopic ones the time scale of inertial motion can become large enough to be relevant for the dynamics. This raises the question how collective dynamics in active matter is influenced by inertia. In this article we implement and study an underdamped active phase field crystal model. We focus on how the collective dynamics changes with the time scale of inertial motion. While the state diagram stays unaltered in this modification, the relaxation time scale towards the steady state considerably increases with particle mass. Our numerical results suggest that transiently stable rotating clusters of density peaks act as defects which need to decay before the final state of global collective motion forms. We extract the formation and decay times quantitatively. Finally, we give a physical intuition for the formation and decay of rotating clusters to qualitatively explain how the extracted times depend on mass.