Abstract
The shear-induced self-organization of active rotors into stripy aggregates is studied by carrying out computational simulations. The rotors, modeled by monolayers of frictional spheres, develop to stripy microstructures only when they counterrotate with respect to the vorticity of the imposed shear flow. The average width of the stripes is demonstrated to be linearly dependent on the relative intensity of active torque to the shear rate. By giving insight into three collective particle behaviors, i.e., shear-induced diffusion, rotation-induced rearrangement, and edge flows, we explain the mechanisms of formation of the particle stripes. Additionally, the rheological result shows the dependence of shear and rotational viscosities on the active torque direction and the oddness of the normal stress response. By exhibiting a collective phenomenon of active rotors, our study paves the way to understanding chiral active matter.
Highlights
Nonequilibrium collective motion is one of the most intriguing behaviors of active matter [1,2,3]
For a collection of rotating active matter, such as spinning biological organisms [4,5,6] and artificial rotors driven by external fields [7,8,9,10,11,12], their rotational motion can be transferred to translations through interactive hydrodynamic and/or contact forces, resulting in spontaneous self-organization that favors rotation in the same direction [13,14]
We show with computational simulations that a monolayer of spherical rotors, which counterrotate with respect to the vorticity of applied simple shear flow, can selforganize to stripelike aggregates that are featured with edge flows
Summary
Nonequilibrium collective motion is one of the most intriguing behaviors of active matter [1,2,3]. For a collection of rotating active matter, such as spinning biological organisms [4,5,6] and artificial rotors driven by external fields [7,8,9,10,11,12], their rotational motion can be transferred to translations through interactive hydrodynamic and/or contact forces, resulting in spontaneous self-organization that favors rotation in the same direction [13,14]. By applying wall-confined shear flows, prior work [21] has reported that the rotating particles can hydrodynamically interact with the walls and self-organize into hexagonally structured strings. Studying the features and mechanisms of collective phenomena of rotating active matter cannot only further the understanding of chiral active systems and contribute to developing potential applications and experimental schemes
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