Flocks of camphor particles can mimick fluid turbulence
Ronan Kervil, Cécile Cottin-Bizonne and Christophe Ybert (team Liquids & Interfaces), with colleagues from Lyon, published an article entitled "Kolmogorovian active turbulence of a sparse assembly of interacting Marangoni surfers" in the journal Physical Review X. This article was selected for a Highlight in Physics.
When viewing the popular and fascinating collective properties arising from flocks of birds, school of fishes or bacteria colonia, todays physicists are facing a handful of open questions. Indeed, how dynamical and structural properties emerge from this so-called active matter, made of self-propelled individuals, involves the understanding of far-from-equilibrium systems, one of the new frontiers in physics.
Looking back at a historical realization of self-propelled particules -a camphor disk lying at the water surface- the authors studied the spatio-temporal dynamics of an assembly of such interfacial surfers. Strikingly, this dynamics appears alike the canonical Kolmogorov description of fluid turbulence, thus providing a quantitative analogy between two separate fields of out-of-equilibrium physics, whose full outcome now remains to explore.
Looking back at a historical realization of self-propelled particules -a camphor disk lying at the water surface- the authors studied the spatio-temporal dynamics of an assembly of such interfacial surfers. Strikingly, this dynamics appears alike the canonical Kolmogorov description of fluid turbulence, thus providing a quantitative analogy between two separate fields of out-of-equilibrium physics, whose full outcome now remains to explore.
