Related papers: Nematic order by elastic interactions and cellular…
Active matter consumes energy from the environment and transforms it into mechanical work. Notable examples from biology include cell division, bacterial swarms, and muscle contraction. In this work, we investigate the nature of active…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
Increasing evidence suggests that active matter exhibits instances of mixed symmetry that cannot be fully described by either polar or nematic formalism. Here, we introduce a minimal model that integrates self-propulsion into the active…
Spatial self-organization emerges in distributed systems exhibiting local interactions when nonlinearities and the appropriate propagation of signals are at work. These kinds of phenomena can be modeled with different frameworks, typically…
Cell sorting, the segregation of cells with different properties into distinct domains, is a key phenomenon in biological processes such as embryogenesis. We use a phase-field model of a confluent cell layer to study the role of activity in…
The operation mechanism of nematic liquid crystals lies in the control of their optical properties by the orientation of underlying nematic directors. In analogy, electronic nematicity refers to a state whose electronic properties…
Recent advances in experimental techniques enable the simultaneous recording of activity from thousands of neurons in the brain, presenting both an opportunity and a challenge: to build meaningful, scalable models of large neural…
We use density-functional theory, of the fundamental-measure type, to study the relative stability of the biaxial nematic phase, with respect to non-uniform phases such as smectic and columnar, in fluids made of hard board-like particles…
We develop a phenomenological mean field theory describing the hidden order phase in URu$_{\text2}$Si$_{\text2}$ as a nematic of the $\text B_{\text{1g}}$ representation staggered along the $c$-axis. Several experimental features are…
Recent experiments on graphene multilayers under displacement field have demonstrated a wide variety of electronically ordered phases, including valley and/or spin polarized phases as well as potentially unconventional superconducting…
Motivated by the experimentally observed shear-induced destabilization and reorientation of smectic A like systems, we consider an extended formulation of smectic A hydrodynamics. We include both, the smectic layering (via the layer…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
Ultracold atoms in Raman-dressed optical lattices allow for effective momentum-dependent interactions among single-species fermions originating from short-range s-wave interactions. These dressed-state interactions combined with very flat…
The dynamics of cellular pattern formation is crucial for understanding embryonic development and tissue morphogenesis. Recent studies have shown that human dermal fibroblasts cultured on liquid crystal elastomers can exhibit an increase in…
An electronic nematic order that originates from superconducting fluctuation but persists above the superconducting transition temperature is often referred to as a vestigial nematic phase. Such a vestigial order belongs to the broader…
We develop a continuum theory to describe the collective dynamics of deformable epithelial cells, using two tensor order parameters to distinguish the force-generating active filaments in the cells from their shape. The theory demonstrates…
The emergence of long-range spatiotemporal order from intrinsic chaos is a central challenge in far-from-equilibrium physics. In active fluids, such as cytoskeletal networks driving cellular motion, self-generated flows typically produce…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
Using Monte Carlo simulations of the Lebwohl--Lasher model we study the director ordering in a nematic cell where the top and bottom surfaces are patterned with a lattice of $\pm 1$ point topological defects of lattice spacing $a$. We find…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…