Related papers: Giant fluctuations and structural effects in a flo…

Living cells establish long-range orientational order through collective alignment, giving rise to topological defects whose functional relevance is increasingly recognized in tissue organization and morphogenesis. Engineered topographical…

We investigate the structural properties of a two-dimensional system of ellipsoidal particles carrying a linear quadrupole moment in their center. These particles represent a simple model for a variety of uncharged, non-polar conjugated…

Dense monolayers of living cells display intriguing relaxation dynamics, reminiscent of soft and glassy materials close to the jamming transition, and migrate collectively when space is available, as in wound healing or in cancer invasion.…

Cell alignment often forms nematic order, which can lead to anomalous collective cell flow due to the so-called active force. Although it is appreciated that cell migration is driven by traction force, a quantitative evaluation of the…

Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…

We elucidate the molecular forces leading to assembly of two dimensional membrane-like structures composed of a one rod-length thick monolayer of aligned rods from an immiscible suspension of hard rods and depleting polymers. We perform…

How does a cell self-organize so that its appendages attain specific lengths that are convenient for their respective functions? What kind of 'rulers' does a cell use to measure the length of these appendages? How does a cell transport…

Layers of two-dimensional materials arranged at a twist angle with respect to each other lead to enlarged unit cells with potentially strongly altered band structures, offering a new arena for novel and engineered many-body ground states.…

Protein aggregation is of great importance in biology, e.g., in amyloid fibrillation. The aggregation processes that occur at the cellular scale must be highly stochastic in nature because of the statistical number fluctuations that arise…

Chemotaxis receptors in E. coli form clusters at the cell poles and also laterally along the cell body, and this clustering plays an important role in signal transduction. Recently, experiments using flourrescence imaging have shown that,…

Filamentous cyanobacteria can show fascinating examples of nonequilibrium self-organization, which however are not well-understood from a physical perspective. We investigate the motility and collective organization of colonies of these…

Collective migration -- the directed, coordinated motion of many self-propelled agents -- is a fascinating emergent behavior exhibited by active matter that has key functional implications for biological systems. Extensive studies have…

Systems in which particles can self-assemble into mono- or bilayers can form variety of stable and metastable structures on a nanometer length scale. For this reason confinement has a particularly strong effect on such systems. We discuss…

Ensembles of particles rotating in a two-dimensional fluid can exhibit chaotic dynamics yet develop signatures of hidden order. Such "rotors" are found in the natural world spanning vastly disparate length scales - from the rotor proteins…

Single-cell experiments have revealed cell-to-cell variability in generation times and growth rates for genetically identical cells. Theoretical models relating the fluctuating generation times of single cells to the population growth rate…

Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…

Controlling the stacking and rotational registry of graphene layers provides a powerful handle on atomic-scale structural reconstructions that alter the electronic landscape at the nanoscale. In particular, this governs how massless and…

Monolayers of growing non-motile rod-shaped bacteria act as active nematic materials composed of hard particles rather than the flexible components of other commonly studied active nematics. The organization of these granular monolayers has…

A fluidized bed is basically a suspension of granular material by an ascending fluid in a tube, and it has a rich dynamics that includes clustering and pattern formation. When the ratio between the tube and grain diameters is small,…

Biological macromolecules have complex and non-trivial energy landscapes, endowing them a unique conformational adaptability and diversity in function. Hence, understanding the processes of elasticity and dissipation at the nanoscale is…