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Onset of meso-scale turbulence in active nematics

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posted on 2018-12-10, 11:40 authored by Amin Doostmohammadi, Tyler Shendruk, Kristian Thijssen, Julia M. Yeomans
Meso-scale turbulence is an innate phenomenon, distinct from inertial turbulence, that spontaneously occurs at low Reynolds number in fluidized biological systems. This spatiotemporal disordered flow radically changes nutrient and molecular transport in living fluids and can strongly affect the collective behaviour in prominent biological processes, including biofilm formation, morphogenesis and cancer invasion. Despite its crucial role in such physiological processes, understanding meso-scale turbulence and any relation to classical inertial turbulence remains obscure. Here we show how the motion of active matter along a micro-channel transitions to meso-scale turbulence through the evolution of locally disordered patches (active puffs) from an ordered vortex-lattice flow state. We demonstrate that the stationary critical exponents of this transition to meso-scale turbulence in a channel coincide with the directed percolation universality class. This finding bridges our understanding of the onset of low-Reynolds-number meso-scale turbulence and traditional scale-invariant turbulence in confinement.

Funding

This work was supported through funding from the ERC Advanced Grant 291234 MiCE and we acknowledge EMBO funding to T.N.S. (ALTF181-2013).

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematical Sciences

Published in

Nature Communications

Volume

8

Citation

DOOSTMOHAMMADI, A. ... et al., 2017. Onset of meso-scale turbulence in active nematics. Nature Communications, 8: 15326.

Publisher

© the Authors. Published by Nature Publications.

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-03-21

Publication date

2017-05-16

Copyright date

2017

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Nature under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

2041-1723

eISSN

2041-1723

Language

  • en

Article number

15326

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