Interacting, running and tumbling: the active Dyson Brownian motion

Abstract: We introduce and study a model in one dimension of $N$ run-and-tumble particles (RTP) which repel each other logarithmically in the presence of an external quadratic potential. This is an "active'' version of the well-known Dyson Brownian motion (DBM) where the particles are subjected to a telegraphic noise, with two possible states $\pm$ with velocity $\pm v_0$. We study analytically and numerically two different versions of this model. In model I a particle only interacts with particles in the same state, while in model II all the particles interact with each other. In the large time limit, both models converge to a steady state where the stationary density has a finite support. For finite $N$, the stationary density exhibits singularities, which disappear when $N \to +\infty$. In that limit, for model I, using a Dean-Kawasaki approach, we show that the stationary density of $+$ (respectively $-$) particles deviates from the DBM Wigner semi-circular shape, and vanishes with an exponent $3/2$ at one of the edges. In model II, the Dean-Kawasaki approach fails but we obtain strong evidence that the density in the large $N$ limit retains a Wigner semi-circular shape.