CMMSSP 2024|Day 1| Morning Session | Plenary Talk by Dr. Abhishek Chaudhuri | Oral Presentations 1 |

Plenary Talk 1

Title: Dynamics of a passive droplet in an active fluid
Speaker: Dr. Abhishek Chaudhuri, IISER Mohali

Abstract:
An active fluid denotes a viscous suspension of particles, cells, or
macromolecules able to convert chemical energy into mechanical work by
generating stresses on the microscale. Think of the cytosol inside cells
which contain different types of biofilaments and motor proteins rendered
active by the hydrolysis of chemical fuel, or a swarm of E. Coli bacteria in
the gut. How does one understand the local and bulk mechanical
properties of fluids such as the above? One of the answers is to suspend
tiny tracer particles in the fluid and look at their dynamics. Recent
experiments of rigid mobile objects in an active fluid have shown that the
chaotic motion of active fluids can be harnessed to rotate milli-meter sized
propellers and pinwheels. What would happen if we considered squishy
objects in a chaotic active fluid? To answer this question we suspended a
soft object with deformable boundaries (like a droplet) in an active
turbulent fluid. The droplet wobbles and its dynamics shows periods of
"runs" and "stays". At relatively low interfacial tension, the droplet begins
to break and mix with the outer active bath. We establish that the motion
of the droplet is influenced by the interplay of spatial correlations of the
flow and the size of the droplet.

Oral Presentation Session 1

Oral Presentations by Ritwick Sarkar, Poulami Bag, Paulomi Ghosh, Olivia Mallick, Ramu Kumar Yadav