Speaker
Description
Active matter refers to systems that consume energy from their surroundings, converting it into forces and motion, keeping them out of equilibrium and leading to diverse phenomena, from moving crowds to bacterial biofilms. This behaviour drives collective and stochastic dynamics, often linked to biological processes.
This study presents an active system with three components: an ATP reservoir, microtubules, and kinesin clusters walking along the microtubules. When brought to an oil-water interface, it forms a bidimensional active nematic material where "active turbulence" emerges due to chaotic flows.
Previous studies have presented a methodology for in-situ photopolymerizing fixed 3D hydrogel structures, enabling real time observation of the active material’s response. This approach has allowed for comprehensive studies of the material’s rheology, including shear viscosity and activity parameter quantification, as well as quantitative mapping of forces around topological defects.
In this work, we focus on how these embedded obstacles are capable of driving the material to transition from an isotropic state, where the flow characteristics are uniformly distributed in space, to an anisotropic regime. In particular, we aim to study and characterize a set of asymmetric structures that generate a net flow through an active pumping mechanism, as well as a network of symmetric structures that form a connected vortex lattice. The latter can give rise to a non-isotropic vortex distribution, with correlations that depend on the structure of the self-sustained flows.
