Reentrance effect in the lane formation of driven colloids

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2004 Jul;70(1 Pt 1):012401. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.70.012401. Epub 2004 Jul 21.

Abstract

Recently it has been shown that a strongly interacting colloidal mixture consisting of oppositely driven particles undergoes a nonequilibrium transition towards lane formation provided the driving strength exceeds a threshold value. We predict here a reentrance effect in lane formation: for fixed high driving force and increasing particle densities, there is first a transition towards lane formation which is followed by another transition back to a state with no lanes. Our result is obtained both by Brownian dynamics computer simulations and by a phenomenological dynamical density functional theory.