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Abstract

Active matter, in which local energy is converted into directed motion, is an area of strong interest in current soft matter research for potential applications in soft robotics. Living nematics are a category of active matter where nematic phases have active particles dispersed in them. In this paper, Turiv et al. study high and low concentrations of swimming bacteria in the nematic phase of the lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal DSCG via microscopy. Photo-alignment is used to create patterned director fields. Patterns including splay and bend are used to focus the trajectory of the bacteria and rectilinear jets undulate at high concentrations of bacteria. These jets are shown to be stabilised by the background director field and the experimental results are supported by simulations. In flows of either concentration of bacteria micro-spheres are shown to be transported along the pre-patterned flows.