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

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.