Defect morphologies in active nematics turbulence

In active nematic liquid crystals, activity is able to drive chaotic spatiotemporal flows referred to as active turbulence. In this regime, the system is cahractaerized by the proliferation of defects. I will address how active stress affects the morphology of disclination lines of a three dimensional active nematic liquid crystal under chaotic flow. I will discuss how activity selects a crossover length scale in between the size of small defect loops and the one of long and tangled defect lines of fractal dimension . This length scale crossover is consistent with the scaling of the average separation between defects as a function of activity. Numerical simlulations, together with a track defect algorithm, show that defects organize as a network of regular contractible loops that coexisting with wrapping defect lines.