Self-propulsion and self-navigation: Activity is a precursor to jamming

Mathias Casiulis, Daniel Hexner, Dov Levine

Published 2021-08-04Version 1

Traffic jams are an everyday hindrance to transport, and typically arise when many vehicles have the same or a similar destination. We show, however, that even when uniformly distributed in space and uncorrelated, targets have a crucial effect on transport. At modest densities an instability arises leading to jams with emergent correlations between the targets. We study the transition between jammed and flowing phase, and find that transport is most efficient on the cusp of jamming. By considering limiting cases of the dynamics which map onto active Brownian particles, we argue that motility induced phase separation is the precursor to jams, which provides a quantitative prediction of the onset density for jamming, and suggests how jamming might be delayed or prevented.