Irreversibility and Chaos in Active Particle Suspensions

Abstract: Active matter has been the object of huge amount of research in recent years for its important fundamental and applicative properties. In this paper we investigate active suspensions of micro-swimmers through direct numerical simulation, so that no approximation is made at the continuous level other than the numerical one. We consider both pusher and puller organisms, with a spherical or ellipsoidal shape. We analyse the velocity and the characteristic scales for an homogeneous two-dimensional suspension and the effective viscosity under shear. We bring evidences that the complex features displayed are related to a spontaneous breaking of the time-reversal symmetry. We show that chaos is not a key ingredient, whereas a large enough number of interacting particles and a non-spherical shape are needed to break the symmetry and are therefore at the basis of the phenomenology. Our numerical study also shows that pullers display some collective motion, though with different characteristics from pushers.