Related papers: Stress reorganisation and response in active solid…
We introduce a phenomenological model to study the properties of bundles of polar filaments which interact via active elements. The stability of the homogeneous state, the attractors of the dynamics in the unstable regime and the tensile…
Very recently, the construction of twist actuators from magnetorheological gels and elastomers has been suggested. These materials consist of magnetizable colloidal particles embedded in a soft elastic polymeric environment. The twist…
Cells and tissues have the remarkable ability to actively generate the forces required to change their shape. This active mechanical behavior is largely mediated by the actin cytoskeleton, a crosslinked network of actin filaments that is…
Cell mechanical functions like locomotion, contraction and division are controlled by the cytoskeleton, a dynamic biopolymer network whose mechanical properties remain poorly understood. We perform single-cell uniaxial stretching…
Many active particles are embedded in environments that exhibit viscoelastic properties. An important class of such media lacks a single characteristic relaxation timescale when subjected to a time-dependent stress. Rather, the stress…
The cell cytoskeleton is a striking example of "active" medium driven out-of-equilibrium by ATP hydrolysis. Such activity has been shown recently to have a spectacular impact on the mechanical and rheological properties of the cellular…
The viscoelastic properties of arterial tissue dictate vessel behavior in certain disease states, injury modalities, and during some endovascular procedures. In this study, we characterized the viscoelastic mechanical response of porcine…
Constitutive equations for a one-dimensional, active, polar, viscoelastic liquid are derived by treating the strain field as a slow hydrodynamic variable. Taking into account the couplings between strain and polarity allowed by symmetry,…
Active materials take advantage of their internal sources of energy to self-organize in an automated manner. This feature provides a novel opportunity to design micron-scale machines with minimal required control. However, self-organization…
Real-world solids, such as rocks, soft tissues, and engineering materials, are often under some form of stress. Most real materials are also, to some degree, anisotropic due to their microstructure, a characteristic often called the…
Actin is a key component of the cytoskeleton, which plays central roles in cell motility, division, growth, and tensile strength. To enable this wide range of transient mechanical processes and properties, networks of actin filaments…
We experimentally study the dynamics of active particles (APs) in a viscoelastic fluid under various geometrical constraints such as flat walls, spherical obstacles and cylindrical cavities. We observe that the main effect of the confined…
Disordered solids often change their elastic response as they slowly age. Using experiments and simulations, we study how aging disordered planar networks under an applied stress affects their nonlinear elastic response. We are able to…
Localized contractile configurations or asters spontaneously appear and disappear as emergent structures in the collective stochastic dynamics of active polar actomyosin filaments. Passive parti- cles which (un)bind to the active filaments…
We introduce a one-dimensional stress-rate type nonlinear viscoelastic model for solids that obey the assumptions of the strain-limiting theory. Unlike the classical viscoelasticity theory, the critical hypothesis in the present…
Dynamically crosslinked semiflexible biopolymers such as the actin cytoskeleton govern the mechanical behavior of living cells. Semiflexible biopolymers nonlinearly stiffen in response to mechanical loads, whereas the crosslinker dynamics…
Collective actuation in active solids - the spontaneous coherent excitation of a few vibrational modes - emerges from a feedback between structural deformations and the orientation of active forces. It is an excellent candidate as a basic…
The actin cortex of an animal cell is a thin polymeric layer attached to the inner side of the plasma membrane. It plays a key role in shape regulation and pattern formation on the cellular and tissue scale and, in particular, generates the…
We introduce models for viscoelastic materials, both solids and fluids, based on logarithmic stresses to capture the elastic contribution to the material response. The matrix logarithm allows to link the measures of strain, that naturally…
We use numerical simulations to study the dynamics of dense assemblies of self-propelled particles in the limit of extremely large, but finite, persistence times. In this limit, the system evolves intermittently between mechanical…