Brownian motion in a growing population of ballistic particles

Nathaniel V. Mon Père, Pierre de Buyl, Sophie de Buyl

Published 2021-10-21, updated 2022-03-24Version 2

We investigate the motility of a growing population of cells in a idealized setting: we consider a system of hard disks in which new particles are added according to prescribed growth kinetics, thereby dynamically changing the number density. As a result, the expected Brownian motion of the hard disks is modified. We compute the density-dependent friction of the hard disks and insert it in an effective Langevin equation to describe the system, assuming that the inter-collision time is smaller than the timescale of the growth. We find that the effective Langevin description captures the changes in motility in agreement with the simulation results. Our framework can be extended to other systems in which the transport coefficient varies with time.