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Related papers: Active matter

200 papers

Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental aspects of many living and engineering systems. Here, the scale of biological agents covers a wide range, from nanomotors, cytoskeleton, and cells, to insects, fish, birds, and people. Inspired…

Biological systems exhibit large-scale self-organized dynamics and structures which enable organisms to perform the functions of life. The field of active matter strives to develop and understand microscopically-driven nonequilibrium…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-02-11 Michael F. Hagan , Aparna Baskaran

Active matter encompasses different nonequilibrium systems in which individual constituents convert energy into non-conservative forces or motion at the microscale. This review provides an elementary introduction to the role of topology in…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-06-28 Suraj Shankar , Anton Souslov , Mark J. Bowick , M. Cristina Marchetti , Vincenzo Vitelli

Active matter comprises self-driven units, such as bacteria and synthetic microswimmers, that can spontaneously form complex patterns and assemble into functional microdevices. These processes are possible thanks to the out-of-equilibrium…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-11-17 Jens Grauer , Falko Schmidt , Jesus Pineda , Benjamin Midtvedt , Hartmut Löwen , Giovanni Volpe , Benno Liebchen

Active matter has played a pivotal role in advancing our understanding of non-equilibrium systems, leading to a fundamental shift in the study of biophysical phenomena. The foundation of active matter research is built on assumptions…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-06-09 Varun Venkatesh , Niels de Graaf Sousa , Amin Doostmohammadi

Active matter systems exhibit rich emergent behavior due to constant injection and dissipation of energy at the level of individual agents. Since these systems are far from equilibrium, their dynamics and energetics cannot be understood…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-04-23 Sarah Eldeen , Ryan Muoio , Paris Blaisdell-Pijuan , Ngoc La , Mauricio Gomez , Alex Vidal , Wylie Ahmed

Active matter is rapidly becoming a key paradigm of out-of-equilibrium soft matter exhibiting complex collective phenomena, yet the thermodynamics of such systems remain poorly understood. In this letter we study the nonequilbrium…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2019-10-30 Emanuele Crosato , Mikhail Prokopenko , Richard E. Spinney

Active matter comprises individual units that convert energy into mechanical motion. In many examples, such as bacterial systems and biofilament assays, constituent units are elongated and can give rise to local nematic orientational order.…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-11-17 He Li , Xia-qing Shi , Mingji Huang , Xiao Chen , Mingfeng Xiao , Chenli Liu , Hugues Chate , H. P. Zhang

Living systems are made of active materials with microscopic components that work together to perform macroscopic biological tasks. The breakdown of these collective functionalities leads to diseases, which, conversely, could be treated by…

Active glassy matter has recently emerged as a novel class of non-equilibrium soft matter, combining energy-driven, active particle movement with dense and disordered glass-like behavior. Here we review the state-of-the-art in this field…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-10-02 Liesbeth M. C. Janssen

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

This paper develops a conceptual extension of the Kinetic Theory of Active Particles, building upon the framework introduced in [2]. Living systems cannot be adequately described within classical single-scale paradigms, even when refined.…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2026-04-22 Diletta Burini , Damian A. Knopoff

Active matter encompasses systems whose individual consituents dissipate energy to exert propelling forces on their environment. This rapidly developing field harbors a dynamical phenomenology with no counterpart in passive systems. The…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-12-19 Jérémy O'Byrne , Yariv Kafri , Julien Tailleur , Frédéric van Wijland

This article aims to introduce the broad field of soft active matter physics and its relevance to the life sciences in simple, accessible language. Although this area of research is relatively new, it has already demonstrated significant…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-04-14 Nitin Kumar

In this perspective article, we discuss bacterial populations as a model system of active matter. It allows for the exploration and characterization of various phases of active matter and brings rich implications for both physics and…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-04-16 Kazumasa A. Takeuchi , Daiki Nishiguchi

Active matter refers to a broad class of non-equilibrium systems where energy is continuously injected at the level of individual ``particles". These systems exhibit emergent collective behaviors that have no direct thermal-equilibrium…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-02-10 Zihan Zheng , Cunyuan Jiang , Yangrui Chen , Matteo Baggioli , Jie Zhang

This article reviews recent research on the collective dynamical behavior of colloids with dipolar or multipolar interactions. Indeed, whereas equilibrium structures and static self-assembly of such systems are now rather well understood,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-02-02 Sabine H. L. Klapp

In the past years, the amount of research on active matter has grown extremely rapidly, a fact that is reflected in particular by the existence of more than 600 review articles on this topic. Moreover, the field has become very diverse,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-07-01 Michael te Vrugt , Raphael Wittkowski

Active matter, as other types of self-organizing systems, relies on the take-up of energy that can be used for different actions, such as active motion or structure formation. Here we provide an agent-based framework to model these…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2018-12-26 Frank Schweitzer

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