Related papers: Active modulation of surfactant driven flow instab…
Self-sustained turbulent structures have been observed in a wide range of living fluids, yet no quantitative theory exists to explain their properties. We report experiments on active turbulence in highly concentrated 3D suspensions of…
Bacterial processes ranging from gene expression to motility and biofilm formation are constantly challenged by internal and external noise. While the importance of stochastic fluctuations has been appreciated for chemotaxis, it is…
Bacteria are ubiquitous in our daily lives, either as motile planktonic cells or as immobilized surface-attached biofilms. These different phenotypic states play key roles in agriculture, environment, industry, and medicine; hence, it is…
Growth patterns generated by filamentous organisms (e.g. actinomycetes and fungi) involve spatial and temporal dynamics at different length scales. Several mathematical models have been proposed in the last thirty years to address these…
Active matter systems display a fascinating range of dynamical states, including stationary patterns and turbulent phases. While the former can be tackled with methods from the field of pattern formation, the spatio-temporal disorder of the…
Transport at small scales is classically understood within an equilibrium framework, where dispersion theory successfully describes shear-enhanced diffusion for passive particles in the continuum limit. However, as most bacteria can move on…
We reveal that the mechanical pulsation of locally synchronised particles is a generic route to propagate deformation waves. We consider a model of dense repulsive particles whose activity drives periodic change in size of each individual.…
We investigate the effects of heterogeneous (spatially varying) activity in a hydrodynamical model for dense bacterial suspensions, confining ourselves to experimentally realizable, simple, quenched, activity patterns. We show that the…
Interaction between active materials and the boundaries of geometrical confinement is key to many emergent phenomena in active systems. For living active matter consisting of animal cells or motile bacteria, the confinement boundary is…
The interplay between active matter and its environment is central to understanding emergent behavior in biological and synthetic systems. Here, we show that coupling active nematic flows to small-amplitude deformations of a compliant…
We study active surface wetting using a minimal model of bacteria that takes into account the intrinsic motility diversity of living matter. A mixture of "fast" and "slow" self-propelled Brownian particles is considered in the presence of a…
We experimentally study the emergence of collective bacterial swimming, a phenomenon often referred to as bacterial turbulence. A phase diagram of the flow of 3D E. coli suspensions spanned by bacterial concentration, the swimming speed of…
The large-scale collective behavior of biological systems can be characterized by macroscopic transport, which arises from the non-equilibrium microscopic interactions among individual constituents. A prominent example is the formation of…
We study diffusion-driven pattern-formation in networks of networks, a class of multilayer systems, where different layers have the same topology, but different internal dynamics. Agents are assumed to disperse within a layer by undergoing…
Inspired by recent experimental observation of patterning at the membrane of a living cell, we propose a generic model for the dynamics of a fluctuating interface driven by particle-like inclusions which stimulate its growth. We find 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…
The hydrodynamic interactions among bacterial cell bodies, flagella, and surrounding boundaries are essential for understanding bacterial motility in complex environments. In this study, we demonstrate that each slender flagellum can be…
We consider two minimal models of active fluid droplets that exhibit complex dynamics including steady motion, deformation, rotation and oscillating motion. First we consider a droplet with a concentration of active contractile matter…
Spreading processes on top of active dynamics provide a novel theoretical framework for capturing emerging collective behavior in living systems. I consider run-and-tumble dynamics coupled with coagulation/decoagulation reactions that lead…
The gut microbiota features important genetic diversity, and the specific spatial features of the gut may shape evolution within this environment. We investigate the fixation probability of neutral bacterial mutants within a minimal model…