Spontaneous rotation can stabilise ordered chiral active fluids

Ananyo Maitra () and Martin Lenz ()
Additional contact information
Ananyo Maitra: Université Paris-Saclay
Martin Lenz: Université Paris-Saclay

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract Active hydrodynamic theories are a powerful tool to study the emergent ordered phases of internally driven particles such as bird flocks, bacterial suspension and their artificial analogues. While theories of orientationally ordered phases are by now well established, the effect of chirality on these phases is much less studied. In this paper, we present a complete dynamical theory of orientationally ordered chiral particles in two-dimensional incompressible systems. We show that phase-coherent states of rotating chiral particles are remarkably stable in both momentum-conserved and non-conserved systems in contrast to their non-rotating counterparts. Furthermore, defect separation—which drives chaotic flows in non-rotating active fluids—is suppressed by intrinsic rotation of chiral active particles. We thus establish chirality as a source of dramatic stabilisation in active systems, which could be key in interpreting the collective behaviors of some biological tissues, cytoskeletal systems and collections of bacteria.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08914-7 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:10:y:2019:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-019-08914-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-08914-7

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().