Related papers: Defect annihilation and proliferation in active ne…
Coupling a many-body system to a thermal environment typically destroys the quantum coherence of its state, leading to an effective classical dynamics at the longest time scales. We show that systems with anyon-like defects can exhibit…
Recent numerical simulations of lid-driven cavity flow of a nematic liquid crystal have found dynamical behavior where topological defects rotate about the center of the fluid vortex induced by the lid motion. By considering a simpler…
We analyze motility-induced phase separation and bubbly phase separation in a two-dimensional lattice model of self-propelled particles. We compare systems where the dense (liquid) phase has slab and droplet geometries. We find that…
Topological defects are an essential part of the structure and dynamics of all liquid crystals, and they are particularly important in experiments and simulations on active liquid crystals. In a recent paper, Vromans and Giomi [Soft Matter,…
We investigate the effects of extrinsic curvature on the turbulent behavior of a 2D active nematic confined to the surface of a cylinder. The surface of a cylinder has no intrinsic curvatrue and only extrinsic curvature. A nematic field…
Via hydrodynamics preserving molecular dynamics simulations we study growth phenomena in a phase separating symmetric binary mixture model. We quench high-temperature homogeneous configurations to state points inside the miscibility gap,…
We study the topological configurations and dynamics of individual point defect vacancies and interstitials in a two-dimensional colloidal crystal. Our Brownian dynamics simulations show that the diffusion mechanism for vacancy defects…
Droplets are essential for spatially controlling biomolecules in cells. To work properly, cells need to control the emergence and morphology of droplets. On the one hand, driven chemical reactions can affect droplets profoundly. For…
Polar active matter - including animal herds, aggregates of motile cells and active colloids - often forms coordinated migration patterns, such as flocking. This orderly motion can be disrupted by full-integer topological defects…
We study dry, dense active nematics at both particle and continuous levels. Specifically, extending the Boltzmann-Ginzburg-Landau approach, we derive well-behaved hydrodynamic equations from a Vicsek-style model with nematic alignment and…
We examine the dynamics of a compressible active nematic liquid crystal on a frictional substrate. When frictional damping dominates over viscous dissipation, we eliminate flow in favor of active stresses to obtain a minimal dynamical model…
We present a novel, self-consistent and robust theoretical model to investigate elastic interactions between topological defects in liquid crystal shells. Accounting for the non-concentric nature of the shell in a simple manner, we are able…
Defects play an important role in a number of fields dealing with ordered structures. They are often described in terms of their topology, mutual interaction and their statistical characteristics. We demonstrate theoretically and…
Internal activity can fundamentally reshape the mechanical behavior of solids, yet its role in softening and failure remains incompletely understood. In this study, we investigate spontaneous deformations in activated solids via non-affine…
Even simple active systems can show a plethora of intriguing phenomena and often we find complexity were we would have expected simplicity. One striking example is the occurrence of a quiescent or absorbing state with frozen fluctuations…
Inert particles suspended in active fluids of self-propelled particles are known to often exhibit enhanced diffusion and novel coherent structures. Here we numerically investigate the dynamical behavior and self-organization in a system…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
From incompressible flows to electrostatics, harmonic functions can provide solutions to many two-dimensional problems and, similarly, the director field of a planar nematic can be determined using complex analysis. We derive a closed-form…
We describe the electrically enhanced growth of needle crystals from the vapor phase, for which there exists a morphological instability above a threshold applied potential. Our improved theoretical treatment of this phenomenon shows that…
How topological defects affect the dynamics of particles hopping between lattice sites of a distorted, two-dimensional crystal is addressed. Perturbation theory and numerical simulations show that weak, short-ranged topological disorder…