Title

Polar Patterns in Active Fluids

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Luca Giomi, Harvard University
M. Cristina Marchetti, Syracuse University

ORCID

Luca Giomi:

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7740-5960

Document Type

Article

Date

6-8-2011

Keywords

condensed matter, soft condensed matter, biological physics

Language

English

Disciplines

Physics

Description/Abstract

We study the spatio-temporal dynamics of a model of polar active fluid in two dimensions. The system exhibits a transition from an isotropic to a polarized state as a function of density. The uniform polarized state is, however, unstable above a critical value of activity. Upon increasing activity, the active fluids displays increasingly complex patterns, including traveling bands, traveling vortices and chaotic behavior. The advection arising from the particles self-propulsion and unique to polar fluids yields qualitatively new behavior as compared to that obtain in active nematic, yielding traveling-wave structures. We show that the nonlinear hydrodynamic equations can be mapped onto a simplified diffusion-reaction-convection model, highlighting the connection between the complex dynamics of active system and that of excitable systems.

Additional Information

This manuscript is from arXiv.org, more information can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.1624

Recommended Citation

arXiv:1106.1624v1

Source

harvested from arXiv.org

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.