Turbulence and turbulent pattern formation in a minimal model for active fluids
Abstract
Active matter systems display a fascinating range of dynamical states, including stationary patterns and turbulent phases. While the former can be tackled with methods from the field of pattern formation, the spatio-temporal disorder of the active turbulence phase calls for a statistical description. Borrowing techniques from turbulence theory, we here establish a quantitative description of correlation functions and spectra of a minimal continuum model for active turbulence. Further exploring the parameter space, we also report on a surprising type of turbulence-driven pattern formation far beyond linear onset: the emergence of a dynamic hexagonal vortex lattice state after an extended turbulent transient, which can only be explained taking into account turbulent energy transfer across scales.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1711.10865,
title = {Turbulence and turbulent pattern formation in a minimal model for active fluids},
author = {Martin James and Wouter J. T. Bos and Michael Wilczek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.10865},
year = {2018}
}
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Supplemental videos available at https://youtu.be/gbf6cRho03w https://youtu.be/n0qUUhAUJFQ https://youtu.be/LGmamkM012c