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Light-controlled flows in active fluids

Nature Physics volume 13, pages 306–312 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Many photosynthetic microorganisms are able to detect light and move towards optimal intensities. This ability, known as phototaxis, plays a major role in ecology by affecting natural phytoplankton mass transfers, and has important applications in bioreactor and artificial micro-swimmers technologies. Here we show that this property can be exploited to generate macroscopic fluid flows using a localized light source directed towards shallow suspensions of phototactic microorganisms. Within the intensity range of positive phototaxis, algae accumulate beneath the excitation light, where collective effects lead to the emergence of radially symmetric convective flows. These flows can thus be used as hydrodynamic tweezers to manipulate small floating objects. At high cell density and layer depth, we uncover a new kind of instability, wherein the viscous torque exerted by self-generated fluid flows on the swimmers induces the formation of travelling waves. A model coupling fluid flow, cell concentration and orientation finely reproduces the experimental data.

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Figure 1: Experimental set-up used to investigate the interaction between light and algae.
Figure 2: Effect of thickness and initial concentration on the concentration profiles.
Figure 3: Formation of unstable patterns above a critical Rayleigh number.
Figure 4: Underlying mechanism of the instability.

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Acknowledgements

We are indebted to our late colleague F. Rappaport and would like to thank S. Bujaldon from IBPC Institute, Paris, for having provided the strains of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and for their kind and helpful advice on culture growth. This project is funded by the programme Emergence(s) of the City of Paris. We thank Y. Couder for critical reading of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire Matière et Systèmes Complexes, Université Denis Diderot, 75013 Paris, France

    Julien Dervaux, Marina Capellazzi Resta & Philippe Brunet

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  1. Julien Dervaux
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  2. Marina Capellazzi Resta
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  3. Philippe Brunet
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Contributions

J.D. and P.B. conceived and designed the experiments. J.D. and M.C.R. performed the experiments. J.D. and P.B. analysed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Julien Dervaux.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Dervaux, J., Capellazzi Resta, M. & Brunet, P. Light-controlled flows in active fluids. Nature Phys 13, 306–312 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3926

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