Visualization of a large-scale shear flow in 2D active nematic turbulence

Advective inertia is responsible for large-scale flow patterns, which, on sufficiently large domains, become visible as meta-stable condensates. Here, a large-scale shear flow forms. The chaotic motion of small vortex dipoles caused by topological defects in the orientation destabilizes the pattern. The visualization is obtained from a direct numerical simulation of the equations of motion with self-advection of the fluid flow. For more details, see [add arXiv link].