Transitions driven by multibody interactions in an effective model of active matter

Abstract When out-of-equilibrium particles interact by means of pairwise forces, their stationary distribution in general exhibits many-body interactions. In the particular case of active particles, it has been shown numerically that the motility induced phase separation (MIPS) cannot be explained by the effective attraction emerging from two isolated particles, thereby highlighting the role of multibody interactions. In this work, we study the thermodynamics of the Fox-unified colored noise approximation for active particles interacting by means of pairwise repulsive forces. Working at large space dimension we establish that multibody interactions up to infinite order are instrumental in giving rise to such collective phenomena as phase transitions. We recover a MIPS-like first order transition, but also find a liquid–liquid transition at somewhat lower persistence times. This new transition is connected to a spin-glass phase of orientational-like degrees of freedom with disordered interactions set by the particle positions themselves.