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Related papers: Dynamics of defects in active nematics

200 papers

The topological properties of many materials are central to their behavior, with the dynamics of topological defects being particularly important to intrinsically out-of-equilibrium, active materials. In this paper, local manipulation of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-11-01 David P. Rivas , Tyler N. Shendruk , Robert R. Henry , Daniel H. Reich , Robert L. Leheny

We establish how active stress globally affects the morphology of disclination lines of a three dimensional active nematic liquid crystal under chaotic flow. Thanks to a defect detection algorithm based on the local nematic orientation, we…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-06-30 Pasquale Digregorio , Cecilia Rorai , Ignacio Pagonabarraga , Federico Toschi

Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…

Liquid crystals inevitably possess topological defect excitations generated through boundary conditions, applied fields or in quenches to the ordered phase. In equilibrium pairs of defects coarsen and annihilate as the uniform ground state…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2013-06-05 Luca Giomi , Mark J. Bowick , Xu Ma , M. Cristina Marchetti

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-08-26 D. J. G. Pearce

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-08-15 Ioannis Hadjifrangiskou , Liam J. Ruske , Julia M. Yeomans

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-12-20 Aurelio Patelli , Ilyas Djafer-Cherif , Igor S. Aranson , Eric Bertin , Hugues Chaté

Topological defects are increasingly being identified in various biological systems, where their characteristic flow fields and stress patterns are associated with continuous active stress generation by biological entities. Here, using…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-11-09 Lasse Bonn , Aleksandra Ardaseva , Romain Mueller , Tyler N. Shendruk , Amin Doostmohammadi

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-12-03 Simon Čopar , Žiga Kos

A wide range of living and artificial active matter exists in close contact with substrates and under strong confinement, where in addition to dipolar active stresses, quadrupolar active stresses can become important. Here, we numerically…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-04-23 Salik A. Sultan , Mehrana R. Nejad , Amin Doostmohammadi

Active turbulence in dense active systems is characterized by high vorticity on a length scale that is large compared to that of individual entities. We describe the properties of active turbulence as momentum propagation is screened by…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2014-12-24 Sumesh P. Thampi , Ramin Golestanian , Julia M. Yeomans

Dense, active systems show active turbulence, a state characterised by flow fields that are chaotic, with continually changing velocity jets and swirls. Here we review our current understanding of active turbulence. The development is…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-08-03 Sumesh P. Thampi , Julia M. Yeomans

Active matter is characterized by its ability to induce motion by self-generated stress. In the case of a solid, such motion can lead to shape transformations. The stress-generating components can be anisotropic endowing the material with…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-05-16 D. J. G. Pearce , S. Gat , G. Livne , A. Bernheim-Groswasser , K. Kruse

In pulsating active matter, topological defects are motile despite the absence of any macroscopic flows and microscopic self-propulsion. We reveal that this motility arises from a ratchet effect: the mechanochemical coupling between local…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-26 Luca Casagrande , Alessandro Manacorda , Etienne Fodor

Topological defects are ubiquitous on surfaces with orientational order fields. Here, we study equilibrium states generated by the feedback between geometry and nematic order on fluid membranes with an integer topological defect. When the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-11-14 D. J. G. Pearce , C. Thibault , Q. Chaboche , C. Blanch-Mercader

We introduce a general description of localised distortions in active nematics using the framework of active nematic multipoles. We give the Stokesian flows for arbitrary multipoles in terms of differentiation of a fundamental flow response…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-04-04 Alexander J. H. Houston , Gareth P. Alexander

Topological defects are singularities in material fields that play a vital role across a range of systems: from cosmic microwave background polarization to superconductors, and biological materials. Although topological defects and their…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2017-10-06 Luca Giomi , Žiga Kos , Miha Ravnik , Anupam Sengupta

Active materials are those in which individual, uncoordinated local stresses drive the material out of equilibrium on a global scale. Examples of such assemblies can be seen across scales from schools of fish to the cellular cytoskeleton…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-09-30 Nitin Kumar , Rui Zhang , Steven A. Redford , Juan J. de Pablo , Margaret L. Gardel

As a method for controlling active materials, researchers have suggested designing patterns of activity on a substrate, which should guide the motion of topological defects. To investigate this concept, we model the behavior of a single…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-02-10 Xingzhou Tang , Jonathan V. Selinger

Using the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, we present a general description of topological defects dynamics in $p$-atic materials on curved surfaces, and simplify it in the case of active nematics. We find that activity induces a geometric…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-08-02 Farzan Vafa , David R. Nelson , Amin Doostmohammadi