Interaction between swarming active matter and flow: the impact on Lagrangian coherent structures

In recent years, research topics concerning active matter have drawn interest from diverse communities. It has been suggested that active matter-as represented by organisms such as zooplankton-has great potential in ocean mixing due to its intrinsic mobility and the sheer amount of biomass. However, prior investigations have predominantly overlooked the influence of external background flow, despite the ubiquity of flow driven by various sources in nature. The interaction between active matter and external flow structures has long been neglected. Here, we conducted experiments using a typical centimeter swimmer, A. salina, and an electromagnetically driven quasi-two-dimensional flow to study the interaction between active matter and flow. We focused on the impact of swarming active matter on hyperbolic Lagrangian coherent structures (LCSs) that mark the most straining regions in the flow. We illustrated that the impact of active matter on LCSs was much more significant compared to localized random noise with similar energy input. In addition, we revealed that the perturbation generated by active matter could couple with the background flow and further deform the LCSs. In addition to the impact on the most straining hyperbolic regions of flow, we also revealed that the rotational elliptical region of the flow was much more susceptible to active matter perturbation. We further described how the influence of active matter changed with their number densities and background flow intensities. We revealed that the LCSs could be decently altered even at a small number density of active matter. Through this work, we aim to provide valuable insights and draw attention to the problem regarding the interaction between active matter and external flow structures.