English
Related papers

Related papers: Emergent Self-organization in Active Materials

200 papers

Active matter, comprising many active agents interacting and moving in fluids or more complex environments, is a commonly occurring state of matter in biological and physical systems. By its very nature active matter systems exist in…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-02-08 Pierre Gaspard , Raymond Kapral

Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-08-28 Tyler D. Ross , Heun Jin Lee , Zijie Qu , Rachel A. Banks , Rob Phillips , Matt Thomson

Active matter research focuses on the emergent behavior among interacting self-propelled particles. Unification of seemingly disconnected paradigms -- active phase-separation of repulsive discs and collective motion of self-propelled rods…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-01-18 Robert Großmann , Igor S. Aranson , Fernando Peruani

Colloidal particles are considered ideal building blocks to produce materials with enhanced physical properties. The state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing these particles provide control over shape, size, and directionality of the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-12-21 N. A. M. Araújo , C. S. Dias , M. M. Telo da Gama

Swimmers and self-propelled particles are physical models for the collective behaviour and motility of a wide variety of living systems, such as bacteria colonies, bird flocks and fish schools. Such artificial active materials are amenable…

A remarkable feat of active matter physics is that systems as diverse as collections of self-propelled particles, nematics mixed with molecular motors, and interacting robots can all be described by symmetry-based continuum theories. These…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-04-28 Jack Binysh , Guido Baardink , Jonas Veenstra , Corentin Coulais , Anton Souslov

Active colloids are microscopic particles, which self-propel through viscous fluids by converting energy extracted from their environment into directed motion. We first explain how articial microswimmers move forward by generating…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-05-12 Andreas Zöttl , Holger Stark

Collective rotations are common in active matter, enhancing cohesion, transport, and mixing. They are typically attributed to chiral non-reciprocal dynamics due to intrinsic particle chirality, torque-generating interactions among units, or…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-04-20 Maks Pečnik Bambič , Nuno A. M. Araújo , Giorgio Volpe

Differently from passive Brownian particles, active particles, also known as self-propelled Brownian particles or microswimmers and nanoswimmers, are capable of taking up energy from their environment and converting it into directed motion.…

Emergent nonreciprocity in active matter drives the formation of self-organized states that transcend the behaviors of equilibrium systems. Integrating experiments, theory and simulations, we demonstrate that active solids composed of…

Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-04-17 Yuchen Xi , Trevor J. Jones , Richard Huang , Tom Marzin , P. -T. Brun

The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…

Materials Science · Physics 2025-09-30 Elisabetta Nocerino

Self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit rich non-equilibrium phenomena and have promising applications in fields such as drug delivery and self-assembled active materials. Previous experimental and theoretical studies have shown that…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-02-01 Zhiwei Peng , Raymond Kapral

In equilibrium, the collective behaviour of particles interacting via steep, short-ranged potentials is well captured by the virial expansion of the free energy at low density. Here, we extend this approach beyond equilibrium to the case of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-06-21 Yuting Irene Li , Rosalba Garcia-Millan , Michael E. Cates , Étienne Fodor

Coexistence of order and fluidity in soft matter often mimics that in biology, allowing for complex dynamics and applications like displays. In active soft matter, emergent order can arise because of such dynamics. Powered by local energy…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-10-18 Hayley R. O. Sohn , Changda D. Liu , Ivan I. Smalyukh

Planktonic active matter represents an emergent system spanning different scales: individual, population and community; and complexity arising from sub-cellular and cellular to collective and ecosystem scale dynamics. This cross-scale…

Biological Physics · Physics 2023-01-24 Anupam Sengupta

With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2013-01-08 Tim Sanchez , Daniel T. N. Chen , Stephen J. DeCamp , Michael Heymann , Zvonimir Dogic

Despite the diversity of materials designated as active matter, virtually all active systems undergo a form of dynamic arrest when crowding and activity compete, reminiscent of the dynamic arrest observed in colloidal and molecular fluids…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-05-28 Ludovic Berthier , Elijah Flenner , Grzegorz Szamel

Collections of simple, self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit complex, emergent dynamical behavior, with promising applications in microrobotics. When confined within a deformable vesicle, self-propelled rods cluster and align,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-10-28 Sophie Y. Lee , Philipp W. A. Schönhöfer , Sharon C. Glotzer

The ability of many living systems to actively self-propel underlies critical biomedical, environmental, and industrial processes. While such active transport is well-studied in uniform settings, environmental complexities such as geometric…

Biological Physics · Physics 2021-08-23 Alejandro Martínez-Calvo , Carolina Trenado-Yuste , Sujit S. Datta