Related papers: Nematic order by elastic interactions and cellular…
We address the problem of orientational order in frustrated interaction systems as a function of the relative range of the competing interactions. We study a spin model Hamiltonian with short range ferromagnetic interaction competing with…
Interaction of electric fields with biological cells is indispensable for many physiological processes. Thermal electrical noise in the cellular environment has long been considered as the minimum threshold for detection of electrical…
Order and alignment are ubiquitous in growing colonies of rod-shaped bacteria due to the nematic properties of the constituent particles. These effects are the result of the active stresses generated by growth, passive mechanical…
Living active collectives have evolved with remarkable self-patterning ability to meet the physical and biological constraints for growth and survival. However, how complex multicellular patterns emerge from a single founder cell remains…
Electronic nematicity is widely observed in quantum materials with varying degrees of electronic correlation, manifesting through charge, spin, orbital, or superconducting degrees of freedom. A phenomenological model capable of describing…
Animal morphogenesis often involves significant shape changes of epithelial tissue sheets. Great progress has been made in understanding the underlying cellular driving forces and their coordination through biomechanical feedback loops.…
Recent experiments have exploited elastic instabilities in membranes to create complex patterns. However, the rational design of such structures poses many challenges, as they are products of nonlinear elastic behavior. We pose a simple…
An intermediate nematic phase is proposed for the interpretation of recent experimental results on phase biaxiality in bent-core nematics. The phase is macroscopically uniaxial but consists of microscopic biaxial, and possibly polar,…
Even though chiral nematic phases were the first liquid crystals experimentally observed more than a century ago, the origin of the thermodynamic stability of cholesteric states is still unclear. In this Letter we address the problem by…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
Active matter consists of self-propelled elements exhibits fascinating collective motions ranging from biological to artificial systems. Among wide varieties of active matter systems, reconstituted bio-filaments moving on molecular motor…
A spin nematic is a state which breaks spin SU(2) symmetry while preserving translational and time reversal symmetries. Spin nematic order can arise naturally from charge fluctuations of a spin stripe state. Focusing on the possible…
Active nematics are conceptually the simplest orientationally ordered phase of self-driven particles, but have proved to be a perennial source of surprises. We show here through numerical solution of coarse-grained equations for order…
We present a unified dynamical mean-field theory for stochastic self-organized critical models. We use a single site approximation and we include the details of different models by using effective parameters and constraints. We identify the…
We study the collective behavior of nonequilibrium systems subject to an external field with a dynamics characterized by the existence of non-interacting states. Aiming at exploring the generality of the results, we consider two types of…
The relation between elasticity and yielding is investigated in a model polymer solid by Molecular-Dynamics simulations. By changing the bending stiffness of the chain and the bond length, semicrystalline and disordered glassy polymers -…
The recent discovery of ferroelectric nematic liquid crystalline phases marks a major breakthrough in soft matter research. An intermediate phase, often observed between the nonpolar and the ferroelectric nematic phase, shows a distinct…
The twist-bend nematic phase, $N_{\rm TB}$, may be viewed as a heliconical molecular arrangement in which the director $\bf n$ precesses uniformly about an extra director field, $\bf t$. It corresponds to a nematic ground state exhibiting…
Amorphous magnetic solids, like metallic glasses, exhibit a novel effect: the growth of magnetic order as a function of mechanical strain under athermal conditions in the presence of a magnetic field. The magnetic moment increases in steps…
The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…