Abstract
The authors show that active nematics confined in channels with chiral anchoring can generate cohesive topological defect clusters, which undergo periodic structural reconfiguration locally and energy oscillations and are transported directionally in a soliton-like form.
Highlights
We focus on active nematics with symmetric boundary anchoring
We show that the emerging dynamics and self-organization of the confined active nematics are dictated by the anchoring angle (√θan) at the boundary walls and the activity number α = H ζ /K, which weighs the effects of the unit activity and the geometric screening [43]
We elucidate the mechanisms underlying the formation of localized solitonlike defect clusters and show that their stable propagation and robust structure reconfiguration are well controlled by the anchoring chirality
Summary
Active many-body systems such as cell populations [1,2,3], cytoskeleton biopolymers [4,5,6,7], bacterial suspensions [8,9,10,11,12], animal collections [13,14,15], and robot swarms [16] ordinarily display diverse dynamics and patterns, including directional motion [2,5,17], sustained rotation [2,18], giant density fluctuations [19,20], synchronized oscillations [10,21], mesoscale turbulence [8], and jamming transition [22,23] These spectacular behaviors are closely relevant to life processes and engineering applications [2,24,25,26] and derive primarily from the specific activity powered by continuous energy injection and rich interactions between the units of systems [27,28,29]. The initial orientation fields, the solitonlike defect clusters can be either synchronized in phase or desynchronized to antiphase
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