Fluid dynamics of bacterial turbulence.

Self-sustained turbulent structures have been observed in a wide range of living fluids, yet no quantitative theory exists to explain their properties. We report experiments on active turbulence in highly concentrated 3D suspensions of Bacillus subtilis and compare them with a minimal fourth-order vector-field theory for incompressible bacterial dynamics. Velocimetry of bacteria and surrounding fluid, determined by imaging cells and tracking colloidal tracers, yields consistent results for velocity statistics and correlations over 2 orders of magnitude in kinetic energy, revealing a decrease of fluid memory with increasing swimming activity and linear scaling between kinetic energy and enstrophy. The best-fit model allows for quantitative agreement with experimental data.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2013-02-21

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.228102arXiv 1302.5277PMID 23767750
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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