Related papers: Nematic order by elastic interactions and cellular…
A cellular automaton model is presented for random walkers with biologically motivated interactions favoring local alignment and leading to collective motion or swarming behavior. The degree of alignment is controlled by a sensitivity…
Simple elastic models of spin-crossover compounds are known empirically to exhibit classical critical behavior. We demonstrate how the long-ranged interactions responsible for this behavior arise naturally upon integrating out mechanical…
The study of spindle-like cells as nematic liquid crystals has led to remarkable insights in the understanding of tissue organization and morphogenesis. In the characterization of this anomalous liquid crystal material, we focus on the…
Expressions are obtained for force and couple densities and stress tensors in macroscopic models for nematic liquid crystals subjected to electric fields. The coupling between the liquid crystal orientational properties and the electric…
Understanding cellular response to mechanical forces is immensely important for a plethora of biological processes. Focal adhesions are multi-molecular protein assemblies that connect the cell to the extracellular matrix and play a pivotal…
The mechanics of animal cells is strongly determined by stress fibers, which are contractile filament bundles that form dynamically in response to extracellular cues. Stress fibers allow the cell to adapt its mechanics to environmental…
We consider a phenomenological continuum model for an active nematic fluid and show a universal, model independent, instability which renders the homogeneous nematic state unstable to order fluctuations. Using numerical and analytic tools…
The magnitude of traction forces exerted by living animal cells on their environment is a monotonically increasing and approximately sigmoidal function of the stiffness of the external medium. This observation is rationalized using active…
Cellularized tissue and polymer networks can both transition from floppy to rigid as a function of their control parameters, and, yet, the two systems often mechanically interact, which may affect their respective rigidities. To study this…
Experimentally it is possible to manipulate the director in a (chiral) smectic-$A$ elastomer using an electric field. This suggests that the director is not necessarily locked to the layer normal, as described in earlier papers that…
Nematic tactoids are spindle-shaped droplets of a nematic phase nucleated in the co-existing isotropic phase. According to equilibrium theory, their internal structure and shape are controlled by a balance between the elastic deformation of…
We develop a fully microscopic, statistical mechanics approach to study phase transitions in Ising systems with competing interactions at different scales. Our aim is to consider orientational and positional order parameters in a unified…
Experimental evidence shows that there is a feedback between cell shape and cell motion. How this feedback impacts the collective behavior of dense cell monolayers remains an open question. We investigate the effect of a feedback that tends…
Nematic order in the iron-based superconductors is closely tied to a lattice distortion and a structural transition from tetragonal to orthorhombic symmetry. External stress of the appropriate symmetry acts as a conjugate field of the…
Two-dimensional nonequilibrium nematic steady states, as found in agitated granular-rod monolayers or films of orientable amoeboid cells, were predicted [Europhys. Lett. {\bf 62} (2003) 196] to have giant number fluctuations, with standard…
We present a simplified molecular model of mesogenic dimers consisting of two identical uniaxial mesogenic cores separated by a fixed-length spacer and allowed to assume only two, statistically equivalent, conformations which are non-planar…
The cell cortex, a thin film of active material assembled below the cell membrane, plays a key role in cellular symmetry breaking processes such as cell polarity establishment and cell division. Here, we present a minimal model of the…
Ferroelectric nematic phases are a new class of polar fluids in which spontaneous polarization is directly coupled to the orientational order, providing unique opportunities for creating self-organized materils with spatially modulated…
Growing experimental evidence shows that cell monolayers can induce long-lived perturbations to their environment, akin to footprints, which in turn influence the global dynamics of the system. Inspired by these observations, we propose a…
In a previous paper [Phys. Rev. E 90, 022506 (2014)], we had studied thermodynamic and structural properties of a three-dimensional simple-cubic lattice model with dipolar-like interaction, truncated at nearest-neighbor separation, for…