Related papers: Traveling and resting crystals in active systems
An amalgamate of nematic liquid crystals and active matter, referred to as living liquid crystals, is a promising self-healing material with futuristic applications for targeted delivery of information and micro-cargo. We provide a…
Simulations show that sliding bilayers of colloidal particles can exhibit a new phase, the ``melt-freeze'' phase, where the layers stochastically alternate between solidlike and liquidlike states. We introduce a mean field phenomenological…
The physics of active systems of self-propelled particles, in the regime of a dense liquid state, is an open puzzle of great current interest, both for statistical physics and because such systems appear in many biological contexts. We…
The dynamics of active smectic liquid crystals confined on a spherical surface is explored through an active phase field crystal model. Starting from an initially randomly perturbed isotropic phase, several types of topological defects are…
Active matter systems comprise self-propelled particles that move on a substrate while leaving chemical trails that influence other particles through chemotaxis (e.g., slime-depositing bacteria). Orientational chemotaxis manifests as a…
Using a generalized order parameter gradient expansion within density functional theory, we derive a phase-field-crystal model for liquid crystals composed by apolar particles in three spatial dimensions. Both the translational density and…
An extremely broad and important class of phenomena in nature involves the settling and aggregation of matter under gravitation in fluid systems. Some examples include: sedimenting marine snow particles in lakes and oceans (central to…
Mobile microscopic bodies, such as motile cells, can be modelled phenomenologically as ``active particles'' which can move against external forces by depleting an internal energy depot. The microscopic mechanisms underlying such ``active''…
We provide a minimal continuum model for mesoscale plasticity, explaining the cellular dislocation structures observed in deformed crystals. Our dislocation density tensor evolves from random, smooth initial conditions to form self-similar…
In this work we derive and analyze coarse-grained descriptions of self-propelled particles with selective attraction-repulsion interaction, where individuals may respond differently to their neighbours depending on their relative state of…
Flocking, as paradigmatically exemplified by birds, is the coherent collective motion of active agents. As originally conceived, flocking emerges through alignment interactions between the agents. Here, we report that flocking can also…
We review our recent modeling of crystal nucleation and polycrystalline growth using a phase field theory. First, we consider the applicability of phase field theory for describing crystal nucleation in a model hard sphere fluid. It is…
Self-propulsion allows living systems to display unusual collective behavior. Unlike passive systems in thermal equilibrium, active matter systems are not constrained by conventional thermodynamic laws. A question arises however as to what…
We study active run-and-tumble particles with an additional two-state internal variable characterizing their motile or non-motile state. Motile particles change irreversibly into non-motile ones upon collision with a non-motile particle.…
One characteristic feature of soft matter systems is their strong response to external stimuli. As a consequence they are comparatively easily driven out of their ground state and out of equilibrium, which leads to many of their fascinating…
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…
The motion of topological defects is an important feature of the dynamics of all liquid crystals, and is especially conspicuous in active liquid crystals. Understanding defect motion is a challenging theoretical problem, because the…
Motivated by the idea of using simple macroscopic examples to illustrate the physics of complex systems, we modify a historic experimental setup in which interacting floating magnets spontaneously self-assemble into ordered clusters. By…
Dense suspensions of self-propelled rod-like particles exhibit a fascinating variety of non-equilibrium phenomena. By means of computer simulations of a minimal model for rigid self-propelled colloidal rods with variable shape we explore…
The study of critical phenomena and phase transitions is an important part of modern condensed matter physics. In this regard, the phenomenological Landau theory has been extraordinarily useful. Hereby we present an alternative theoretical…