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Soft matter

Frictionless fluids from bacterial teamwork

Nature volume 525, pages 37–39 (2015)Cite this article

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By increasing the sensitivity of an established technique, researchers have shown that swimming bacteria can make frictionless fluids — with potential applications in areas such as microfluidics.

The viscosity of a liquid is a measure of its resistance to flow. In general, denser fluids are more viscous and require more energy to get them to flow through a pipe. Flow with no energy dissipation is a hallmark of exotic states of matter such as superfluidity and superconductivity. Key to these exotic states are quantum effects that dominate at ultralow temperatures — turning liquid helium, for example, into a superfluid that flows without friction through cracks as thin as molecules. Writing in Physical Review Letters, López et al.1 demonstrate that Escherichia coli bacteria swimming in a fluid can organize themselves to counterbalance the energy loss resulting from viscous dissipation and thereby dramatically lower the fluid's viscosity, driving it to vanish or even to become negative.

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Figure 1: Viscosity modulation by rod-like bacteria.

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  1. M. Cristina Marchetti is in the Department of Physics and Syracuse Biomaterials Institute, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244, USA.,

    M. Cristina Marchetti

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  1. M. Cristina Marchetti
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Correspondence to M. Cristina Marchetti.

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Marchetti, M. Frictionless fluids from bacterial teamwork. Nature 525, 37–39 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/525037a

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