Regensburg 2019 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 52: Poster: Active Matter, Microswimmer, Microfluidics

DY 52.5: Poster

Thursday, April 4, 2019, 15:00–18:00, Poster B2

The role of inertia in active nematic turbulence — •Colin-Marius Koch and Michael Wilczek — Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen

Suspensions of active agents with nematic interactions exhibit complex spatio-temporal dynamics such as mesoscale turbulence. Continuum descriptions for such systems are typically inspired by the theory of liquid crystals and combine hydrodynamics with active nematic stresses. The resulting equations feature an advective nonlinearity which represents inertial effects. The generically low Reynolds number of such active flows raises the question of the importance of the inertial effects. To address this question, we investigate active turbulence in a two-dimensional dense suspension of active nematic liquid crystals. We quantitatively compare numerical simulations with and without nonlinear advection of the flow field. This study will help to better understand the interplay of self-induced turbulent flow and local ordering.