Hydrodynamics of a hard-core active lattice gas

Abstract

We present a fluctuating hydrodynamic description of an active lattice gas model with excluded volume interactions that exhibits motility-induced phase separation under appropriate conditions. For quasi-one-dimension and higher, stability analysis of the noiseless hydrodynamics gives quantitative bounds on the phase boundary of the motility-induced phase separation in terms of spinodal and binodal. Inclusion of the multiplicative noise in the fluctuating hydrodynamics describes the exponentially decaying two-point correlations in the stationary-state homogeneous phase. Our hydrodynamic description and theoretical predictions based on it are in excellent agreement with our Monte Carlo simulations and pseudospectral iteration of the hydrodynamics equations. Our construction of hydrodynamics for this model is not suitable in strictly one dimension with single-file constraints, and we argue that this breakdown is associated with microphase separation.