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A simple micro-swimmer model inspired by the general equation for nonequilibrium reversible-irreversible coupling

A simple mean-field micro-swimmer model is presented. The model is inspired by the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of multi-component fluids that undergo chemical reactions. These thermodynamics can be rigorously described in the context of the GENERIC (general equation for the nonequilibrium reversible-irreversible coupling) framework. More specifically this approach was recently applied to non-ideal polymer solutions (Indei and Schieber, J. Chem. Phys, 146, 184902, 2017). One of the species of the solution is an unreactive polymer chain represented by the bead-spring model. Using this detailed description as inspiration we then make several simplifying assumptions to obtain a mean-field model for a Janus micro-swimmer. The swimmer model considered here consists of a polymer dumbbell in a sea of reactants. One of the beads of the dumbbell is allowed to act as a catalyst for a chemical reaction between the reactants. We show that the mean-squared displacement, MSD, of the center of mass of this Janus dumbbell exhibits ballistic behavior at time scales at which the concentration of reactant is large. The time scales at which the ballistic behavior is observed in the MSD coincides with the time scales at which the cross-correlation between the swimmer's orientation and the direction of its displacement exhibit a maximum. Since the swimmer model was inspired by the GENERIC framework it is possible to ensure that the entropy generation is always positive and therefore the second law of thermodynamics is obeyed.