Hydrodynamic instabilities and collective dynamics in activity-balanced pusher-puller mixtures

Abstract

Microorganisms living in microfluidic environments often form multi-species swarms, where they can leverage collective motions to achieve enhanced transport and spreading. Nevertheless, there is a general lack of physical understandings of the origins of the multiscale unstable dynamics observed within these systems. Here, we build a computational model to study binary suspensions of rear- and front-actuated microswimmers, or respectively the so-called "pusher" and "puller" particles, that have different populations and swimming speeds. We perform direct particle simulations to reveal that collective system dynamics are possible even in the scenario of an "activity-balanced" mixture, which produces near zero mean extra stress. We first construct a continuum kinetic model to describe the initial transient period when the system is near uniform isotropy and then perform linear stability analysis to reveal the system's finite-wavelength hydrodynamic instabilities, in contrast with the long-wavelength instabilities of pure pusher/puller suspensions. Then, we carry out slender-body discrete particle simulations to resolve both the short time instabilities and the the longtime dynamics, which feature non-trivial density fluctuations and spatially-correlated motions, distinct from those of single-species.