Transition to spontaneous directional flows in confined active fluids

Abstract eng:
Recent experimental, theoretical and computational studies have shown that confinement can profoundly affect self-organization in concentrated active suspensions leading to striking features such as formation of steady and spontaneous vortices in radial confinement. Motivated by these observations, we study the two-dimensional dynamics in a confined suspension of biologically active particles using a mean-field kinetic theory for which we developed a novel numerical solver. The dynamics in both circular and racetrack geometries are investigated, where we show that the interplay of confinement and activity can stabilize collective motion into spontaneous flowing states, including steady vortices, unidirectional motion, and travelling waves. Our simulation results are also shown to compare favorably with predictions from a linear stability analysis.

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