Intermittency measurement in two-dimensional bacterial turbulence

• Published in: Physical review. E 2016-06, Vol.93 (6), p.062226-062226, Article 062226
• Main Authors: Qiu, Xiang, Ding, Long, Huang, Yongxiang, Chen, Ming, Lu, Zhiming, Liu, Yulu, Zhou, Quan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bacillus subtilis - physiology; Computer Simulation; Models, Theoretical; Motion; Nonlinear Dynamics; Spectrum Analysis; Viscosity
• ISSN: 2470-0045; 2470-0053
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.93.062226

In this paper, an experimental velocity database of a bacterial collective motion, e.g., Bacillus subtilis, in turbulent phase with volume filling fraction 84% provided by Professor Goldstein at Cambridge University (UK), was analyzed to emphasize the scaling behavior of this active turbulence system. This was accomplished by performing a Hilbert-based methodology analysis to retrieve the scaling property without the β-limitation. A dual-power-law behavior separated by the viscosity scale ℓ_{ν} was observed for the qth-order Hilbert moment L_{q}(k). This dual-power-law belongs to an inverse-cascade since the scaling range is above the injection scale R, e.g., the bacterial body length. The measured scaling exponents ζ(q) of both the small-scale (k>k_{ν}) and large-scale (k