Title: Tuning Shear Rheology of Soft Materials through Active Dopants

Author (Talk): Haicen Yue, University of Vermont

Abstract:

Recent studies on active soft matter have demonstrated the role of particle activity in tuning soft materials' rheology and fluid-glass-jamming transitions. However, these studies focus on purely active systems, despite the fact that many real-world systems are mixtures of active and passive components. In this work, we numerically investigate the shear rheology and solid-to-fluid transition in mixtures of soft passive Brownian particles doped with active Brownian particles. By systematically varying dopant fraction, we demonstrate that even a small fraction of active dopants triggers fluidization with comparable efficiency to fully active systems, offering a pathway to tune soft material properties through active doping. We also show that active energy combining dopant fraction and self propulsion speed governs the rheological property. This reduces the dimensionality of parameter space, providing a straightforward approach to designing cost-efficient doping strategies in terms of self propulsion speed and dopant fraction.