Journal article
Onset of meso-scale turbulence in active nematics
- Abstract:
- Meso-scale turbulence is an innate phenomenon, distinct from inertial turbulence, that spontaneously occurs at low-Reynolds number in fluidized biological systems. This spatio-temporal 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 mesoscale 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 scaleinvariant turbulence, therefore generalizing theories on the onset of turbulence in confinement to the distinct classes of incoherent flows observed in biological fluids.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 2.3MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/ncomms15326
Authors
- Publisher:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Journal:
- Nature Communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 8
- Pages:
- 15326
- Publication date:
- 2017-05-01
- Acceptance date:
- 2017-03-21
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2041-1723
- Pubs id:
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pubs:689503
- UUID:
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uuid:582df95f-c8f3-4361-870a-37562c8e9de5
- Local pid:
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pubs:689503
- Source identifiers:
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689503
- Deposit date:
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2017-04-13
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Yeomans et al
- Copyright date:
- 2017
- Notes:
- © The Author(s) 2017. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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