Related papers: Entropic forces stabilize diverse emergent structu…

Colloidal particles hold promise for mobilizing and removing trapped immiscible fluids from porous media, with implications for key energy and water applications. Most studies focus on accomplishing this goal using particles that can…

Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…

The growing interest in the non-equilibrium assembly of colloidal particles in active liquids is driven by the motivation to create novel structures endowed with tunable properties unattainable within the confines of equilibrium systems.…

While the collective motion of active particles has been studied extensively, effective strategies to navigate particle swarms without external guidance remain elusive. We introduce a method to control the trajectories of two-dimensional…

We investigate density fluctuations in three-dimensional chiral active fluids by using a simple model of helical self-propelled particles. Helical motion is generated by a constant angular velocity (or chiral torque) acting on the…

The transport of particles across lipid-bilayer membranes is important for biological cells to exchange information and material with their environment. Large particles often get wrapped by membranes, a process which has been intensively…

The combination of elliptical deformation of streamlines and vorticity can lead to the destabilisation of any rotating flow via the elliptical instability. Such a mechanism has been invoked as a possible source of turbulence in planetary…

Cell walls define a cell shape in bacteria. They are rigid to resist large internal pressures, but remarkably plastic to adapt to a wide range of external forces and geometric constraints. Currently, it is unknown how bacteria maintain…

We compute the entropic interactions between two colloidal spheres immersed in a dilute suspension of semi-flexible rods. Our model treats the semi-flexible rod as a bent rod at fixed angle, set by the rod contour and persistence lengths.…

We simulate a two dimensional model of self-propelled particles confined by a deformable boundary. The particles tend to accumulate near the boundary and the shape of the boundary deforms upon the collisions. We find that there are two…

In clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME), clathrin and various adaptor proteins coat a patch of the plasma membrane, which is reshaped to form a budded vesicle. Experimental studies have demonstrated that elevated membrane tension can inhibit…

We study the entropic force due to a fluctuating semiflexible polymer that is grafted from one end and confined by a rigid and rough wall from the other end. We show how roughness of the wall modifies the entropic force. In addition to the…

We coarse-grain a model of closely-packed ellipses that can vary their aspect ratio to derive continuum equations for materials comprising confluent deformable particles such as epithelial cell layers. We show that contractile nearest…

Polymeric particles are strong candidates for designing artificial materials capable of emulating the complex twisting-based functionality observed in biological systems. In this letter, we provide the first detailed investigation of the…

Hydrodynamic interactions can generate rich emergent structures in active matter systems. Using large-scale hydrodynamic simulations, we demonstrate that hydrodynamic coupling alone can drive spontaneous self-organization across a hierarchy…

Since the lipid raft model was developed at the end of the last century, it became clear that the specific molecular arrangements of phospholipid assemblies within a membrane have profound implications in a vast range of physiological…

The mechanical deformability of single cells is an important indicator for various diseases such as cancer, blood diseases and inflammation. Lab-on-a-chip devices allow to separate such cells from healthy cells using hydrodynamic forces. We…

In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…

Using Brownian dynamics (BD) simulations and an analytical approach we investigate the shear-induced, nonequilibrium dynamics of dense colloidal suspensions confined to a narrow slit-pore. Focusing on situations where the colloids arrange…

When stressed sufficiently, solid materials yield and deform plastically via reorganization of microscopic constituents. Indeed, it is possible to alter the micro-structure of materials by judicious application of stress, an empirical pro-…