The study of liquid crystals at equilibrium has led to fundamental insights into the nature of ordered materials, as well as to practical applications such as display technologies. Active nematics are a fundamentally different class of liquid crystals, driven away from equilibrium by the autonomous motion of their constituent rod-like particles. This internally generated activity powers the continuous creation and annihilation of topological defects, which leads to complex streaming flows whose chaotic dynamics seem to destroy long-range order. Here, we study these dynamics in experimental and computational realizations of active nematics. By tracking thousands of defects over centimetre-scale distances in microtubule-based active nematics, we identify a non-equilibrium phase characterized by a system-spanning orientational order of defects. This emergent order persists over hours despite defect lifetimes of only seconds. Similar dynamical structures are observed in coarse-grained simulations, suggesting that defect-ordered phases are a generic feature of active nematics.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 26. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 16 June 2025.
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#1,801,094
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#1,434
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#18,940
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Outputs of similar age from Nature Materials
#33
of 77 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 32,013,898 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 94th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 5,101 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 32.0. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 71% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 77 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 57% of its contemporaries.
