Defect turbulence in a dense suspension of polar, active swimmers

• Published in: Physical review. E 2024-02, Vol.109 (2-1), p.024603-024603, Article 024603
• Main Authors: Rana, Navdeep, Chatterjee, Rayan, Ro, Sunghan, Levine, Dov, Ramaswamy, Sriram, Perlekar, Prasad
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2470-0045; 2470-0053
• DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.109.024603

We study the effects of inertia in dense suspensions of polar swimmers. The hydrodynamic velocity field and the polar order parameter field describe the dynamics of the suspension. We show that a dimensionless parameter R (ratio of the swimmer self-advection speed to the active stress invasion speed [Phys. Rev. X 11, 031063 (2021)2160-330810.1103/PhysRevX.11.031063]) controls the stability of an ordered swimmer suspension. For R smaller than a threshold R_{1}, perturbations grow at a rate proportional to their wave number q. Beyond R_{1} we show that the growth rate is O(q^{2}) until a second threshold R=R_{2} is reached. The suspension is stable for R>R_{2}. We perform direct numerical simulations to characterize the steady-state properties and observe defect turbulence for R