Active matters composed of self-propelled particles are nonequilibrium systems that have gained wide interests in recent years, due to its extensive existence and fascinating behavior. Our favorite objects for investigations range from colloidal suspensions, polymers, complex fluids and glasses etc., as well as the active counterpart of them. We focus our attention on the numerical simulations and the developing of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics theories of such systems,including sorting of dynamically chiral microswimmers, self-assembly of active core corona particles, passive particle diffusion in active bath. Representative results are given as follows:

Rod-assisted heterogeneous nucleation in active suspensions

We have studied the heterogeneous nucleation process and phase behaviors of a suspension of active Brownian particles by introducing a rod-like passive seed. We found that such a seed can exponentially accelerate the nucleation rate and thus readily induce phase separation of a dilute active system, while a homogeneous one with the same volume fraction still maintains a single phase. Interestingly, we found that the phase behavior is re-entrant with the activity: single-phase states exist at both high and low activities, with phase separated states in between

Polymer segregation in cylindrical confinement

We have studied the dynamic separation process of two identical polymers confined in a cylinder, based on a three dimensional (3D) free energy landscape. The landscape suggests a distinct mechanism of induction process to previous studies which is neither diffusion nor barrier-crossing.

Active particle in polymer solution

We have studied the diffusion behavior of an active brownian particle in semidilute polymer solution. And we found the diffusion coefficient of particle shows a non-monotonical dependency with the particle size, which it increases firstly and then decreases.

主要论文：Study of active Brownian particle diffusion in polymer solutions, Soft matter, 15(9): 2020-2031 (2019)