Spontaneous Circulation of Confined Active Suspensions

Abstract

Many active fluid systems encountered in biology are set in total geometric confinement. Cytoplasmic streaming in plant cells is a prominent and ubiquitous example, in which cargo-carrying molecular motors move along polymer filaments and generate coherent cell-scale flow. When filaments are not fixed to the cell periphery, a situation found both in vivo and in vitro, we observe that the basic dynamics of streaming are closely related to those of a non-motile stresslet suspension. Under this model, it is demonstrated that confinement makes possible a stable circulating state; a linear stability analysis reveals an activity threshold for spontaneous auto-circulation. Numerical analysis of the long-time behavior reveals a phenomenon akin to defect separation in nematic liquid crystals, and a high-activity bifurcation to an oscillatory regime.

5 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles
• Hydrodynamics of self-propelled hard rods
• Excitable Patterns in Active Nematics

Cited by in corpus (40)

• Spontaneous motion in hierarchically assembled active matter
• Fluid Flows Created by Swimming Bacteria Drive Self-Organization in Confined Suspensions
• A physical perspective on cytoplasmic streaming (invited)
• Viscoelastic control of spatiotemporal order in bacterial active matter
• Minimal continuum theories of structure formation in dense active fluids
• Insensitivity of active nematic dynamics to topological constraints
• Spontaneous mirror-symmetry breaking induces inverse energy cascade in 3D active fluids
• Swirling Instability of the Microtubule Cytoskeleton
• Confinement-induced Self-Pumping in 3D Active Fluids
• Vesicle shape transformations driven by confined active filaments
• Many-body microhydrodynamics of colloidal particles with active boundary layers
• Emergent probability fluxes in confined microbial navigation
• Disordered boundaries destroy bulk phase separation in scalar active matter
• Stochastic cycle selection in active flow networks
• Velocity alignment leads to high persistence in confined cells
• Geometry-Induced Dynamics of Confined Chiral Active Matter
• Motility versus fluctuations in mixtures of self-propelled and passive agents
• Defect Spirograph: Dynamical Behavior of Defects in Spatially Patterned Active Nematics
• Emergence of collective dynamical chirality for achiral active particles
• Collective motion in a sheet of microswimmers
• Defect Line Coarsening and Refinement in Active Nematics
• Viscous propulsion in active transversely-isotropic media
• Spontaneous rotation of active droplets in two and three dimensions
• Helical Flow States in Active Nematics
• Spontaneous flow instabilities of active polar fluids in three dimensions
• The hydrodynamics of slender swimmers near deformable interfaces
• Tubulation and dispersion of oil by bacterial growth on droplets
• A fast Chebyshev method for the Bingham closure with application to active nematic suspensions
• Stability of the interface of an isotropic active fluid
• The fluid dynamics of collective vortex structures of plant-animal worms
• Viscoelastic levitation
• Object Transport by a Confined Active Suspension
• Active particles confined in deformable droplets
• Density-polarity coupling in confined active polar films: asters, spirals, and biphasic orientational phases
• Active patterning and asymmetric transport in a model actomyosin network
• Persistent fluid flows defined by active matter boundaries
• Phase behaviour of active particles in block copolymer melts
• Self-sustained oscillations of active viscoelastic matter
• Flow coupling between active and passive fluids across water-oil interfaces
• Physical entanglements mediate coherent motion of the active topological glass confined within a spherical cavity