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Condensed Matter > Soft Condensed Matter
Title: Active nematic liquid crystals under a quenched random field
(Submitted on 12 Apr 2024 (v1), last revised 15 Apr 2024 (this version, v2))
Abstract: Coupling between flow and orientation is a central issue in understanding the collective dynamics of active biofilaments and cells. Active stressess generated by motor activity destroy (quasi-)long-range orientational order and induce chaotic vortex flows. In cellular and subcellular environment, alignment is also hindered by heterogeneous filamentous structures in extracellular matrix and various organelles in a cell. Here we address the effects of a quenched random field on the flow patterns and orientational order in two-dimensional active nematic liquid crystals. We found that the director dynamics is frozen above a critical disorder strength. For sufficiently strong randomness, the orientational correlation function decays exponentially with the distance, reproducing the behavior of passive random-field nematics. In contrast, the flow velocity decreases only gradually as the randomness is increased, and develops a logarithmic spatial correlation for strong disorder. The threshold between the activity- and disorder-dominated regimes is specified and its dependence on the activity parameter is discussed.
Submission history
From: Nariya Uchida [view email][v1] Fri, 12 Apr 2024 15:14:01 GMT (905kb,D)
[v2] Mon, 15 Apr 2024 03:06:00 GMT (905kb,D)
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