Collective Behaviour of Confined Bacterial Suspensions (INVITED)

Abstract eng:
It is now well-established that laterally unbounded dense suspensions of motile bacteria can exhibit collective behaviour consisting of transient, recurring vortices and jets on scales large compared to the individual cells. Recently, through a combination of theoretical and experimental work, attention has focused on the effects of confinement on such dynamics, with the discovery that in sufficiently small circular domains there can be spontaneous circulation in the form of a spiral vortex. Subsequently it has been shown that lattices of interconnected domains can exhibit ordered patterns that are, by analogy to magnetic systems, ferro- or antiferromagnetic depending upon details of the coupling between adjacent domains. In this talk I present an overview of these systems and highlight very recent work on the role of ‘edge currents’ of bacteria in organizing the large-scale patterns.

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