Related papers: Tunable corrugated patterns in an active gel sheet
The spontaneous emergence of coherent structures from chaotic backgrounds is a hallmark of active biological swarms. We investigate this self-organization by simulating an ensemble of polar chiral active agents that couple locally via a…
Spatially localised defect structures emerge spontaneously in a hydrodynamic description of an active polar fluid comprising polar 'actin' filaments and 'myosin' motor proteins that (un)bind to filaments and exert active contractile…
Curvature and mechanics are intimately connected for thin materials, and this coupling between geometry and physical properties is readily seen in folded structures from intestinal villi and pollen grains, to wrinkled membranes and…
Many active materials and biological systems are driven far from equilibrium by embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces and distort the surrounding material. Probing and characterizing these athermal fluctuations is essential for…
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…
The spontaneous emergence of collective flows is a generic property of active fluids and often leads to chaotic flow patterns characterised by swirls, jets, and topological disclinations in their orientation field. However, the ability to…
The wrinkling of thin elastic objects provides a means of generating regular patterning at small scales in applications ranging from photovoltaics to microfluidic devices. Static wrinkle patterns are known to be governed by an energetic…
Living systems are chiral on multiple scales, from constituent biopolymers to large scale morphology, and their active mechanics is both driven by chiral components and serves to generate chiral morphologies. We describe the mechanics of…
High-density granular active matter is a useful model for dense animal collectives and could be useful for designing reconfigurable materials that can flow or solidify on command. Recent work has demonstrated key similarities and…
Various active materials exhibit strong spatio-temporal variability of their orientational order known as active turbulence, characterised by irregular and chaotic motion of topological defects, including colloidal suspensions,…
We report on new patterns in high-speed flows of granular materials obtained by means of extensive numerical simulations. These patterns emerge from the destabilization of unidirectional flows upon increase of mass holdup and inclination…
We use numerical simulations and linear stability analysis to study active nematic droplets, in the regime where the passive phase is isotropic. We show that activity leads to the emergence of nematic order and of spontaneous rotation in…
We use computer simulations to study the morphology and rheological properties of a bidimensional emulsion resulting from a mixture of a passive isotropic fluid and an active contractile polar gel, in the presence of a surfactant that…
Soft-granular media, such as dense emulsions, foams or tissues, exhibit either fluid- or solid-like properties depending on the applied external stresses. Whereas bulk rheology of such materials has been thoroughly investigated, the…
Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…
We consider a phase-separating mixture of active and passive fluids and explore morphological asymmetries of the emerging dominantly bicontinous dynamic emulsion. Two-dimensional numerical simulations reveal that the geometric and…
We use large-scale computer simulations to explore the non-equilibrium aging dynamics in a microscopic model for colloidal gels. We find that gelation resulting from a kinetically-arrested phase separation is accompanied by `anomalous'…
Reconstituted filamentous actin networks with myosin motor proteins form active gels, in which motor proteins generate forces that drive the network far from equilibrium. This motor activity can also strongly affect the network elasticity;…
Patterns forming spontaneously in extended, three-dimensional, dissipative systems are likely to excite several homogeneous soft modes ($\approx$ hydrodynamic modes) of the underlying physical system, much more than quasi one- and…
One characteristic feature of soft matter systems is their strong response to external stimuli. As a consequence they are comparatively easily driven out of their ground state and out of equilibrium, which leads to many of their fascinating…