Issue 1, 2019

The interplay between activity and filament flexibility determines the emergent properties of active nematics

Abstract

Active nematics are microscopically driven liquid crystals that exhibit dynamical steady states characterized by the creation and annihilation of topological defects. Motivated by differences between previous simulations of active nematics based on rigid rods and experimental realizations based on semiflexible biopolymer filaments, we describe a large-scale simulation study of a particle-based computational model that explicitly incorporates filament semiflexibility. We find that energy injected into the system at the particle scale preferentially excites bend deformations, reducing the apparent filament bend modulus. The emergent characteristics of the active nematic depend on activity and flexibility only through this activity-renormalized bend ‘modulus’, demonstrating that apparent values of material parameters, such as the Frank ‘constants’, depend on activity. Thus, phenomenological parameters within continuum hydrodynamic descriptions of active nematics must account for this dependence. Further, we present a systematic way to estimate these parameters from observations of deformation fields and defect shapes in experimental or simulation data.

Graphical abstract: The interplay between activity and filament flexibility determines the emergent properties of active nematics

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
29 Oct 2018
Accepted
27 Nov 2018
First published
29 Nov 2018

Soft Matter, 2019,15, 94-101

Author version available

The interplay between activity and filament flexibility determines the emergent properties of active nematics

A. Joshi, E. Putzig, A. Baskaran and M. F. Hagan, Soft Matter, 2019, 15, 94 DOI: 10.1039/C8SM02202J

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements