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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…
How the cells break symmetry and organize their edge activity to move directionally is a fun- damental question in cell biology. Physical models of cell motility commonly rely on gradients of regulatory factors and/or feedback from the…
We present a generic framework for describing interacting, spinning, active polar particles, aimed at modelling dense cell aggregates, where cells are treated as polar, rotating objects that interact mechanically with one another and their…
There are many examples of driven and active matter systems containing particles that exhibit circular motion with different chiralities, such as swimming bacteria near surfaces or certain types of self-driven colloidal particles. Circular…
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…
Many motile microorganisms and bio-mimetic micro-particles have been successfully modeled as active rods - elongated bodies capable of self-propulsion. A hallmark of active rod dynamics under confinement is their tendency to accumulate at…
We have adapted classical molecular dynamics to study the structural and dynamical properties of amorphous silica surfaces. Concerning the structure, the density profile exhibits oscillations perpendicularly to the surface as observed in…
Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…
Despite their fundamentally non-equilibrium nature, the individual and collective behavior of active systems with polar propulsion and isotropic interactions (polar-isotropic active systems) are remarkably well captured by equilibrium…
The migration of cells is relevant for processes such as morphogenesis, wound healing, and invasion of cancer cells. In order to move, single cells deform cyclically. However, it is not understood how these shape oscillations influence…
We present a model of soft active particles that leads to a rich array of collective behavior found also in dense biological swarms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms. Our model uses only local interactions, such as Vicsek-type…
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,…
We investigate the collective behavior of motile rods immersed in a monolayer of apolar rods confined between vertically vibrating plates using numerical simulations. We uncover an antidiffusive instability whereby motile rods segregate…
We investigate dynamics and interactions of particles levitated and trapped by the thermophoretic force in a vacuum cell. Our analysis is based on footage taken by orthogonal cameras that are able to capture the three dimensional…
We study the motion of superfluid vortices with filled massive cores. Previous point-vortex models already pointed out the impact of the core mass on the vortex dynamical properties, but relied on an assumption that is questionable in many…
Optical vortex traps created from helical modes of light can drive fluid-borne colloidal particles in circular trajectories. Concentric circulating rings of particles formed by coaxial optical vortices form a microscopic Couette cell, in…
We use numerical simulations and linear stability analysis to study the dynamics of an active liquid crystal film on a substrate in the regime where the passive system would be isotropic. Extensile activity builds up local orientational…
Self-propulsion and navigation due to the sensing of environmental conditions - such as durotaxis and chemotaxis - are remarkable properties of biological cells that cannot be reproduced by single-component self-propelled particles. We…
We study by Molecular Dynamics simulation a dense one-component system of particles confined on a spherical substrate. We more specifically investigate the evolution of the structural and dynamical properties of the system when changing the…
We consider a finite-dimensional model for the motion of microscopic organisms whose propulsion exploits the action of a layer of cilia covering its surface. The model couples Newton's laws driving the organism, considered as a rigid body,…