2017_ncomms_transTurb.pdf (2.28 MB)
Onset of meso-scale turbulence in active nematics
journal contribution
posted on 2018-12-10, 11:40 authored by Amin Doostmohammadi, Tyler Shendruk, Kristian Thijssen, Julia M. YeomansMeso-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 CommunicationsVolume
8Citation
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
2017-03-21Publication date
2017-05-16Copyright date
2017Notes
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
2041-1723eISSN
2041-1723Publisher version
Language
- en