Fig. 5. Alignment of the flow directors for arrays with high symmetry.
The emergent alignment of the directors of drops arranged in square arrays of size 3 × 3 for two independent experiments (left and middle panel; for visual clarity, the region around the director is shaded in blue in accordance with the observed gray scale density). The right panel shows the theoretically predicted chemical gradients, i.e., the director d before normalization (see Supplementary Note 3) with the activity strength Qi taken to be proportional to the area of the base of the i-th drop. The differences in the emergent orientations of the directors between the two repeats of the experiment are clearly noticeable in the central part of the ensemble. The scale bars correspond to 150 μm.