Related papers: Active Materials: Biological Benchmarks and Transp…
Close to equilibrium, the exchange of particles and heat between macroscopic systems at different temperatures and different chemical potentials is known to be governed by a matrix of transport coefficients which is positive and symmetric.…
In these Lecture Notes we aim at clarifying how soft matter physics, and herein notably statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics, can be engaged to understand and manipulate non-equilibrium systems consisting of numerous (microscopic)…
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…
We scrutinize the temporally-resolved speed of active cargo transport in living cells, and show intermittent bursting motions. These nonlinear fluctuations follow a scaling law over several decades of time and space, the statistical…
The term active matter describes diverse systems, spanning macroscopic (e.g. shoals of fish and flocks of birds) to microscopic scales (e.g. migrating cells, motile bacteria and gels formed through the interaction of nanoscale molecular…
Environmental fluid mechanics underlies a wealth of natural, industrial and, by extension, societal challenges. In the coming decades, as we strive towards a more sustainable planet, there are a wide range of grand challenge problems that…
We provide the theoretical basis of calorimetry for a class of active particles subject to thermal noise. Simulating AC-calorimetry, we numerically evaluate the heat capacity of run-and-tumble particles in double-well and in periodic…
Many crucial biological processes operate with surprisingly small numbers of molecules, and there is renewed interest in analyzing the impact of noise associated with these small numbers. Twenty--five years ago, Berg and Purcell showed that…
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…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into mechanical work to produce autonomous motion, and exhibit striking collective dynamics that biology relies on for essential functions. Controlling those dynamics and transport in…
The notion of a nonequilibrium heat capacity is important for bio-energetics and for calorimetry of active materials more generally. It centers around the notion of excess heat or excess work dissipated during a quasistatic relaxation…
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 show that active transport processes in biological systems can be understood through a local equilibrium description formulated at the mesoscale, the scale to describe stochastic processes. This new approach uses the method established…
Properties of transport of molecular motors are investigated. A simplified model based on the concept of Brownian ratchets is applied. We analyze a stochastic equation of motion by means of numerical methods. The transport is systematically…
Biomolecules carry out very specialized tasks inside the cell where energies involved are few tens of k_BT, small enough for thermal fluctuations to be relevant in many biomolecular processes. In this paper I discuss a few concepts and…
Uncovering new mechanisms for rectification of stochastic fluctuations has been a longstanding problem in non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. Here, using a model parity violating metamaterial that is allowed to interact with a bath of…
We numerically examine the transport of active run-and-tumble particles driven with a drift force over random disordered landscapes comprised of fixed obstacles. For increasing run lengths, the net particle transport initially increases…
Chemically active droplets provide simple models for cell-like systems that can grow and divide. Such active droplet systems are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium and turn over chemically, which corresponds to a simple metabolism.…
Molecular signalling in living cells occurs at low copy numbers and is thereby inherently limited by the noise imposed by thermal diffusion. The precision at which biochemical receptors can count signalling molecules is intimately related…
Traffic-like collective movements are observed at almost all levels of biological systems. Molecular motor proteins like, for example, kinesin and dynein, which are the vehicles of almost all intra-cellular transport in eukayotic cells,…