Low-Pass Filtering of Active Turbulent Flows to Liquid Substrates

TL;DR

This paper models the coupling of active turbulent nematic fluids with passive substrates, revealing a natural low-pass filtering effect and analyzing the transfer of chaotic dynamics between layers.

Contribution

It introduces a coupled active-passive fluid model, deriving an analytical transfer function and linking theoretical predictions with experimental observations.

Findings

Active turbulence induces chaos in the substrate.

The system acts as a low-pass filter for flow structures.

Analytical predictions match experimental velocity correlations.

Abstract

To study the impact of active systems on their surroundings, we introduce a model that couples an active nematic fluid to an isotropic substrate fluid via friction. We numerically show that as the active layer develops turbulence, the substrate inherits the chaotic behaviour, exhibiting a novel form of turbulence driven by locally generated stochastic forcing from the active layer. In particular, the short-length-scale flow structures in the active layer are filtered out, so the system behaves as a de facto low-pass filter. We derive analytically the transfer function between the two layers and use it to predict the large-q decay of the substrate energy spectrum, and to investigate how tensorial quantities, such as the strain rate and the active stresses, are transmitted between the active layer and the substrate. Our analysis agrees with recent experiments measuring velocity-velocity correlations in mixtures of active and passive microtubules, and it may have implications for traction force microscopy measurements in cellular layers.