期刊名称:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN:0027-8424
电子版ISSN:1091-6490
出版年度:2018
卷号:115
期号:27
页码:6934-6939
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1720607115
语种:English
出版社:The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要:Suspensions of actively driven anisotropic objects exhibit distinctively nonequilibrium behaviors, and current theories predict that they are incapable of sustaining orientational order at high activity. By contrast, here we show that nematic suspensions on a substrate can display order at arbitrarily high activity due to a previously unreported, potentially stabilizing active force. This force moreover emerges inevitably in theories of active orientable fluids under geometric confinement. The resulting nonequilibrium ordered phase displays robust giant number fluctuations that cannot be suppressed even by an incompressible solvent. Our results apply to virtually all experimental assays used to investigate the active nematic ordering of self-propelled colloids, bacterial suspensions, and the cytoskeleton and have testable implications in interpreting their nonequilibrium behaviors.
关键词:active matter ; living liquid crystals ; confined active nematics