Controlling Turbulent Flows in Compressible Active Liquid Crystals
Abstract
Motivated by experiments on light-patterned, quasi-2D active suspensions that exhibit large density variations, we develop a continuum theory of compressible active nematics--suspensions of apolar rods whose orientation is invariant under π rotations. Under spatially patterned activity, the extensile isotropic active pressure expels material from high-activity regions and accumulates it in low-activity ones; an exactly solvable scalar reduction shows that the resulting density contrast is governed by a single dimensionless parameter, linear in the compressibility. Using compressibility as a tuning knob, we then steer active turbulence from high- to low-activity regions and, at sharp activity interfaces, stabilize an analytically tractable dynamical steady state: a one-dimensional chain of vortices held by soft, activity-induced confinement. Our results establish compressibility as a control parameter for density variations and turbulent flow in active nematic suspensions.
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BibTeX
@misc{krommydas2026controlling,
title = {{Controlling Turbulent Flows in Compressible Active Liquid Crystals}},
author = {Dimitrios Krommydas and Paarth Gulati and Aparna Baskaran and M. Cristina Marchetti},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2607.24927},
eprint = {2607.24927},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24927},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Controlling Turbulent Flows in Compressible Active Liquid Crystals
AU - Dimitrios Krommydas
AU - Paarth Gulati
AU - Aparna Baskaran
AU - M. Cristina Marchetti
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/15
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2607.24927
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24927
AB - Motivated by experiments on light-patterned, quasi-2D active suspensions that exhibit large density variations, we develop a continuum theory of compressible active nematics--suspensions of apolar rods whose orientation is invariant under π rotations. Under spatially patterned activity, the extensile isotropic active pressure expels material from high-activity regions and accumulates it in low-activity ones; an exactly solvable scalar reduction shows that the resulting density contrast is governed by a single dimensionless parameter, linear in the compressibility. Using compressibility as a tuning knob, we then steer active turbulence from high- to low-activity regions and, at sharp activity interfaces, stabilize an analytically tractable dynamical steady state: a one-dimensional chain of vortices held by soft, activity-induced confinement. Our results establish compressibility as a control parameter for density variations and turbulent flow in active nematic suspensions.
ER -