https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-025-00544-w
Research - Flowing Matter
Chiral particles in Taylor–Couette turbulence
1
Physics of Fluids department and Max Planck Center for Complex Fluid Dynamics, J. M. Burgers Centre for Fluid Dynamics, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 NB, Enschede, The Netherlands
2
Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Am Faßberg 17, Göttingen, Germany
a
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b
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Received:
19
August
2025
Accepted:
2
December
2025
Published online:
8
January
2026
This work investigates chiral particles, which break mirror symmetry, in turbulent Taylor–Couette flow. These particles generally display a translation-rotation coupling moving through a quiescent fluid. Here, we performed experiments using large chiral particles (typical size 5mm) in turbulent Taylor–Couette flow, for Reynolds numbers 
. The density-matched chiral particles are studied in a dilute regime 
, where their location and orientation are tracked over time to investigate the particle-fluid coupling. We investigate whether the translation-rotation coupling observed at low Reynolds numbers is still observable over the measured high Reynolds numbers, using the tracked location and orientation. Similarly, we verify whether the chiral particles display a preferred location or orientation, and whether the left-handed and right-handed particles show different rotation statistics. The location data show that the chiral particles closely follow the structure of Taylor vortices. Hence, the orientation data and rotation data of the chiral particles are split between the Taylor vortices and particle chiralities. The results show no difference in rotation and orientation dynamics between chiralities. Rather, the particle dynamics are flow-dominated, where the flow vorticity determines the specific particle dynamics.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/s10189-025-00544-w.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to EDP Sciences, SIF and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
