Related papers: Physics of Active Emulsions
Droplets help organize cells by compartmentalizing biomolecules and by mediating mechanical interactions. When bridging two structures, such droplets generate capillary forces, which depend on surface properties and distance. While the…
Evaporating colloidal droplets have long been used as model systems to understand capillarity, interfacial transport, and particle assembly, most prominently through the coffee ring effect. In classical descriptions, suspended particles are…
The onset of life is often framed around membrane bound compartments and encoded metabolism, leaving unresolved how spatial organization arose before stable boundaries. In this context, environmental gradients are usually treated as…
Phase separation is a fairly common physical phenomenon with examples including the formation of water droplets from humid air (fog, rain), the separation of a crystalline structure from an isotropic material such as a liquid or even the…
We consider a phenomenological continuum model for an active nematic fluid and show a universal, model independent, instability which renders the homogeneous nematic state unstable to order fluctuations. Using numerical and analytic tools…
Active matter agents consume internal energy or extract energy from the environment for locomotion and force generation. Already rather generic models, such as ensembles of active Brownian particles, exhibit phenomena, which are absent at…
This paper considers the interaction between two droplets placed on a substrate in immediate vicinity. We show here that when the two droplets are of different fluids and especially when one of the droplet is highly volatile, a wealth of…
We study binary mixtures of small active and big passive athermal particles interacting via soft repulsive forces on a frictional substrate. Athermal self propelled particles are known to phase separate into a dense aggregate and a dilute…
Living cells use phase separation and concentration gradients to organize chemical compartments in space. Here, we present a theoretical study of droplet dynamics in gradient systems. We derive the corresponding growth law of droplets and…
The interplay between phase separation and wetting of multicomponent mixtures is ubiquitous in nature and technology and recently gained significant attention across scientific disciplines, due to the discovery of biomolecular condensates.…
A common feature of biological self-organization is how active agents communicate with each other or their environment via chemical signaling. Such communications, mediated by self-generated chemical gradients, have consequences for both…
Biomolecular condensates play a crucial role in the spatial organization of living matter. These membrane-less organelles, resulting from liquid-liquid phase separation, operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium, with their size and…
Perturbations of fluid media can give rise to non-equilibrium dynamics, which may in turn cause motion of immersed inclusions. We consider perturbations ("activations") that are local in space and time, of a fluid density which is…
Motility-induced phase separation, MIPS, is arguably the most well-studied collective phenomenon occurring in active matter without alignment interactions (scalar active matter). Its basic origin is simple: since self-propelled particles…
Yield stress fluids are widely used in industrial application to arrest dense solid particles, which can be studied by using a concentrated emulsion as a model fluid. We show in experiments that particle sedimentation in emulsions cannot be…
Active Brownian particles (ABPs), when subject to purely repulsive interactions, are known to undergo activity-induced phase separation broadly resembling an equilibrium (attraction-induced) gas-liquid coexistence. Here we present an…
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…
We study phase-separating fluid mixtures as they demix in the presence of chemical reactions that maintain them away from thermodynamic equilibrium. We show that in such chemically active emulsions the interplay of chemical reactions, phase…
Motility-induced phase separation (MIPS) is a well-studied nonequilibrium collective phenomenon observed in active particles. Recently, there has been growing interest in how coupling the self-propulsion of active particles to chemical…
Membraneless droplets or liquid condensates formed via liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) play a pivotal role in cell biology and hold potential for biomedical engineering. While membraneless droplets are often studied in the context of…