Nonlinear spontaneous flow instability in active nematics
arXiv:2403.16841 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.238301
Abstract
Active nematics exhibit spontaneous flows through a well-known linear instability of the uniformly-aligned quiescent state. Here we show that even a linearly stable uniform state can experience a nonlinear instability, resulting in a discontinuous transition to spontaneous flows. In this case, quiescent and flowing states may coexist. Through a weakly nonlinear analysis and a numerical study, we trace the bifurcation diagram of striped patterns and show that the underlying pitchfork bifurcation switches from supercritical (continuous) to subcritical (discontinuous) by varying the flow-alignment parameter. We predict that the discontinuous spontaneous flow transition occurs for a wide range of parameters, including systems of contractile flow-aligning rods. Our predictions are relevant to active nematic turbulence and can potentially be tested in experiments on either cell layers or active cytoskeletal suspensions.
References in corpus (27)
- Spontaneous motion in hierarchically assembled active matter
- Meso-scale turbulence in living fluids
- Hydrodynamic fluctuations and instabilities in ordered suspensions of self-propelled particles
- Fluid dynamics of bacterial turbulence
- Generic theory of active polar gels: a paradigm for cytoskeletal dynamics
- Spontaneous flow transition in active polar gels
- Orientational order of motile defects in active nematics
- Steady-state hydrodynamic instabilities of active liquid crystals: Hybrid lattice Boltzmann simulations
- Active Turbulence
- Defect dynamics in active nematics
- Topological structure and dynamics of three dimensional active nematics
- Turbulent dynamics of epithelial cell cultures
- Tunable structure and dynamics of active liquid crystals
- Taming active turbulence with patterned soft interfaces
- Data-driven quantitative modeling of bacterial active nematics
- Mesoscopic Turbulence and Local Order in Janus Particles Self-Propelling under an AC Electric Field
- Structuring Stress for Active Materials Control
- Spontaneous flow states in active nematics: a unified picture
- Universal scaling of active nematic turbulence
- Tuning the random walk of active colloids
- Cell division: a source of active stress in cellular monolayers
- Tunable dynamics of microtubule based active isotropic gels
- Statistical Properties of Autonomous Flows in 2D Active Nematics
- The propagation of active-passive interfaces in bacterial swarms
- Confinement controlled bend instability of three-dimensional active fluids
- Kolmogorovian active turbulence of a sparse assembly of interacting swimmers
- Intermittency, fluctuations and maximal chaos in an emergent universal state of active turbulence