Dynamic Density Functional Theory with hydrodynamic interactions and fluctuations

Abstract: We derive a closed equation for the empirical concentration of colloidal particles in the presence of both hydrodynamic and direct interactions. The ensemble average of our functional Langevin equation reproduces known deterministic Dynamic Density Functional Theory (DDFT) [Rex and L\"owen, Phys. Rev. Lett., 101(14):148302, 2008], and, at the same time, it also describes the microscopic fluctuations around the mean behavior. We suggest separating the ideal (non-interacting) contribution from additional corrections due to pairwise interactions. We find that, for an incompressible fluid and in the absence of direct interactions, the mean concentration follows Fick's law just as for uncorrelated walkers. At the same time, the nature of the stochastic terms in fluctuating DDFT is shown to be distinctly different for hydrodynamically-correlated and uncorrelated walkers. This leads to striking differences in the behavior of the fluctuations around Fick's law, even in the absence of pairwise interactions. We connect our own prior work [A. Donev, T. G. Fai, E. Vanden-Eijnden, J. Stat. Mech., P04004, 2014] on fluctuating hydrodynamics of diffusion in liquids to the DDFT literature, and demonstrate that the fluid cannot easily be eliminated from consideration if one wants to describe the collective diffusion in colloidal suspensions.