The reliable musings of a Physics Bloke

Welcome to my blog. Come in, put your feet up and allow me to share with you some thoughts, anecdotes and news about my lifelong vocation. I am a fully qualified Physics Bloke, in possession of one PhD and one Y chromosome. My only goal, as we mull over the mysteries of this strange universe, is to be interesting. If it’s interesting, it goes in the blog, whether it’s the latest discovery, or was know by Aristotle. Of course, being interesting is easy if you make things up (consult the red-top newspaper of your choice) but, like any scientist, I promise to pursue only the truth. OK, so that’s two goals: to be interesting and accurate, and if I witter any longer, I’ll miss the first one. So have a look at this intriguing picture.




A living superfluid

http://www.dur.ac.uk/suzanne.fielding/interests.html

In this week’s PANDA meeting (that’s Pattern Formation, Nonlinear Dynamics and Applications) at Leeds University’s Department of Applied Mathematics, Dr Suzanne Fielding, a physicist from Durham University, presented the results of her theoretical research on "active fluids". The strange texture of folds and swirls, pictured above, is predicted by her mathematical model.

The symmetry-based theories of condensed matter physics are usually used to model inanimate materials like semiconductors, liquid crystals and magnets. But Fielding has applied them to understand the swarming behaviour of microscopic swimmers such as amoebae. These organisms are so numerous and tiny that, en masse, they form a fluid with liquid-crystalline properties, making shades of light and dark in polarized light (see picture), like a liquid crystal display (LCD).

This active fluid of living organisms flows in peculiar ways. A fluid’s viscosity is a measure of how “thick” it is – how hard you have to push to make it flow at a given rate. So water has a low viscosity, but treacle’s viscosity is high. Fielding has used her model to calculate the viscosity of a dense swarm of microbes.

“Even at zero stress, it can spontaneously flow with a finite shear rate,” she says. “So it has exactly zero viscosity. It’s a superfluid!”

This is a very strange result. Superfluids – liquids that flow without friction – are rare, and have previously only been encountered at extremely low temperatures, close to absolute zero. If Fielding’s predictions are correct, this would be the first example of superfluidity at room temperature. Whereas the “traditional” superfluid, liquid helium, relies on the weird quantum physics of ultra-low temperatures to achieve perfect frictionlessness, Fielding’s active fluid simply relies on the hard work of billions of microbes swimming furiously.

So what’s it going to be used for? The applications of a room-temperature superfluid have yet to be invented, since no-one ever anticipated such a discovery, but they will surely be impressive. Ideas anyone?

References:
“Nonlinear dynamics and rheology of active fluids: simulations in two dimensions”, S. M. Fielding, D. Marenduzzo and M. E. Cates, Physical Review E 83 (2011) 041910