Interfacial Properties of Active-Passive Polymer Mixtures

Active matter consists of particles that dissipate energy, from their own sources, in the form of mechanical work on their surroundings. Recent interest in active-passive polymer mixtures has been driven by their relevance in phase separation of (e.g., transcriptionally) active and inactive (transcriptionally silent) DNA strands in nuclei of living cells. In this paper, we study the interfacial properties of the phase separated steady states of the active-passive polymer mixtures and compare them with equilibrium phase separation. We model the active constituents by assigning them stronger-than-thermal fluctuations. We demonstrate that the entropy production is an accurate indicator of the phase transition. We then construct phase diagrams and analyze kinetic properties of the particles as a function of the distance from the interface. Studying the interface fluctuations, we find that they follow the capillary waves spectrum. This allows us to establish a mechanistic definition of the interfacial stiffness and its dependence on the relative level of activity with respect to the passive constituents. We show how the interfacial width depends on the activity ratio and comment on the finite size effects. Our results highlight similarities and differences of the non-equilibrium steady states with an equilibrium phase separated polymer mixture with a lower critical solution temperature. We present several directions in which the non-equilibrium system can be studied further and point out interesting observations that indicate general principles behind the non-equilibrium phase separation.