Related papers: Fluidization and Active Thinning by Molecular Kine…

Cell shape changes are largely controlled by the actin cytoskeleton, a dynamic filament network beneath the plasma membrane. Several cell types can form extended free-standing protrusions not supported by an extracellular substrate or…

Recent research has shown that motile cells can adapt their mode of propulsion to the mechanical properties of the environment in which they find themselves--crawling in some environments while swimming in others. The latter can involve…

Softer means stickier for solid adhesives, because material compliance facilitates close contact between non-conformal surfaces. Recent discoveries have revealed that soft materials can exhibit a rich array of new physics arising from…

Cell polarization underlies many cellular processes, such as differentiation, migration, and budding. Many living cells, such as budding yeast and fission yeast, use cytoskeletal structures to actively transport proteins to one location on…

The purpose of this work is to use active particles to study the effect of facilitation on supercooled liquids. To this end we investigate the behavior of a model supercooled liquid doped with intermittently active and intermittently slowed…

When a gel absorbs solvent from surrounding, stress field is created in the gel, and this causes complex dynamics of the swelling behavior. Here we study this effect for disk-shaped gel by rigorously solving the diffusio-mechanical coupling…

Meso-scale turbulence was originally observed experimentally in various suspensions of swimming bacteria, as well as in the collective motion of active colloids. The corresponding large-scale dynamical patterns were reproduced in a simple…

In this work, we explore the dynamics of active entangled chains using molecular dynamics simulations of a modified Kremer-Grest model. The active chains are diluted in a mesh of very long passive linear chains, to avoid constraint release…

Magnetic gels with embedded micro/nano-sized magnetic particles in crosslinked polymer networks can be actuated by external magnetic fields, with changes in their internal microscopic structures and macroscopic mechanical properties. We…

We show that a viscoelastic thin sheet driven out of equilibrium by active structural remodelling develops a rich variety of shapes as a result of a competition between viscous relaxation and activity. In the regime where active processes…

Thermo-responsive hydrogels are a promising material for creating controllable actuators for use in micro-scale devices, since they expand and contract significantly (absorbing or expelling fluid) in response to relatively small temperature…

We study a model for the motion of a tracer particle inside an active gel, exposing the properties of the van Hove distribution of the particle displacements. Active events of a typical force magnitude give rise to non-Gaussian…

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 evaluation of hydrodynamic transport coefficients in relativistic field theory, and the emergence of an effective kinetic theory description, is examined. Even in a weakly-coupled scalar field theory, interesting subtleties arise at…

Turbulence is most commonly associated with high Reynolds number flow, however the framework of turbulent dynamics has been conceptually extended to many other fields, such as magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, elastic wave turbulence in…

Adhering cells actively probe the mechanical properties of their environment and use the resulting information to position and orient themselves. We show that a large body of experimental observations can be consistently explained from one…

Bulk rheological properties of viscoelastic fluids have been extensively studied in macroscopic shearing geometries. However, little is known when an active microscopic probe is used to locally perturb them far from the linear-response…

We report a computer simulation study of a model gel-former obtained by modifying the three-body interactions of the Stillinger-Weber potential for silicon. This modification reduces the average coordination number and consequently shifts…

Contraction of the cytokinetic ring during cell division leads to physical partitioning of a eukaryotic cell into two daughter cells. This involves flows of actin filaments and myosin motors in the growing membrane interface at the…

Active contributions to fluctuations are a direct consequence of metabolic energy consumption in living cells. Such metabolic processes continuously create active forces, which deform the membrane to control motility, proliferation as well…