Related papers: Nemato-elastic crawlers
We extend a model for the morphology and dynamics of a crawling eukaryotic cell to describe cells on micropatterned substrates. This model couples cell morphology, adhesion, and cytoskeletal flow in response to active stresses induced by…
The phase behavior of charged rods in the presence of inter-rod linkers is studied theoretically as a model for the equilibrium behavior underlying the organization of actin filaments by linker proteins in the cytoskeleton. The presence of…
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
Sliding parts in nanosystems such as Nano ElectroMechanical Systems (NEMS) and nanomotors, increasingly involve large speeds, and rotations as well as translations of the moving surfaces; yet, the physics of high speed nanoscale friction is…
Photoactive nematic elastomers are soft rubbery solids that undergo deformation when illuminated. They are made by incorporating photoactive molecules like azobenzene into nematic liquid crystal elastomers. Since its initial demonstration…
We investigate the statistical behavior of a system comprising fore-aft symmetric rods confined between two vertically vibrating plates using numerical simulations closely resembling the experimental setup studied by Narayan et al., Science…
In this article, we construct and analyze models of anisotropic crosslinked polymers employing tools from the theory of liquid crystal elastomers. The anisotropy of these systems stems from the presence of rigid-rod molecular units in the…
In the experiments on stress-induced phase transitions in SMA strips, several interesting instability phenomena have been observed, including a necking-type instability, a shear-type instability and an orientation instability. By using the…
We use continuum simulations to study the impact of anisotropic hydrodynamic friction on the emergent flows of active nematics. We show that, depending on whether the active particles align with or tumble in their collectively self-induced…
We study the linear instability with respect to necking of a filament of polymeric fluid undergoing uniaxial extension. Contrary to the widely discussed Considere criterion, we find the onset of instability to relate closely to the onset of…
We consider a continuum model of active viscoelastic matter, whereby an active nematic liquid-crystal is coupled to a minimal model of polymer dynamics with a viscoelastic relaxation time $\tau_C$. To explore the resulting interplay between…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
We study the symmetry and the spatial uniformity of orientational order of the biaxial nematic phase in the light of recent experimental observations of phase biaxiality in thermotropic bent-core and calamitic-tetramer nematics. We present…
We consider the weakly first order phase transition between the isotropic and ordered phases of nematics in terms of the behavior of topological line defects. Analytical and Monte Carlo results are presented for a new coarse-grained lattice…
We show that the dominant mode of alignment plays an important role in dry active nematics,leading to two dynamical sub-classes defined by the nature of the instability of the nematic bands that characterize, in these systems, the…
Soft robots offer a frontier in robotics with enormous potential for safe human-robot interaction and agility in uncertain environments. A stepping stone towards unlocking their potential is a control theory tailored to soft robotics,…
We present the modeling, design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired soft robot capable of crawling on surfaces by actively manipulating the frictional force between its body and the surface. Earthworms are segmented…
We propose a lattice statistical model to investigate the phase diagrams and the soft responses of nematic liquid-crystal elastomers. Using suitably scaled infinite-range interactions, we obtain exact self-consistent equations for the…
The understanding of self-organization in the twist-bend nematic $(N_\text{TB})$ phase, identified in 2011 in liquid crystal dimers, is at the forefront of soft matter research worldwide. This new nematic phase develops structural chirality…
Active nematics are microscopically driven liquid crystals that exhibit dynamical steady states characterized by the creation and annihilation of topological defects. Motivated by experimental realizations of such systems made of biopolymer…