Related papers: Solid-Liquid Transition of Deformable and Overlapp…
We use a custom shear cell coupled to an optical microscope to investigate at the particle level the yielding transition in concentrated emulsions subjected to an oscillatory shear deformation. By performing experiments lasting thousands of…
We use numerical simulation to examine the possibility of a reversible liquid-liquid transition in supercooled water and related systems. In particular, for two atomistic models of water, we have computed free energies as functions of…
The rheology of biological tissues is important for their function, and we would like to better understand how single cells control global tissue properties such as tissue fluidity. A confluent tissue can fluidize when cells diffuse by…
We use computer simulations to study the dynamics of a physical gel at high densities where gelation and the glass transition interfere. We report and provide detailed physical understanding of complex relaxation patterns for time…
Experimental evidence shows that there is a feedback between cell shape and cell motion. How this feedback impacts the collective behavior of dense cell monolayers remains an open question. We investigate the effect of a feedback that tends…
Polycrystalline solids can exhibit material properties that differ significantly from those of equivalent single-crystal samples, in part, because of a spontaneous redistribution of mobile point defects into so-called space-charge regions…
We study by molecular dynamics computer simulation a binary soft-sphere mixture that shows a pronounced decoupling of the species' long-time dynamics. Anomalous, power-law-like diffusion of small particles arises, that can be understood as…
Lipid bilayer membranes are the fundamental biological barriers that permit life. The bilayer dynamics largely participates in orchestrating cellular workings and is characterized by substantial stability together with extreme plasticity…
We study the glass transition by exploring a broad class of kinetic rules that can significantly modify the normal dynamics of super-cooled liquids, while maintaining thermal equilibrium. Beyond the usual dynamics of liquids, this class…
We study dynamic heterogeneities in a model glass-former whose overlap with a reference configuration is constrained to a fixed value. The system phase-separates into regions of small and large overlap, so that dynamical correlations remain…
We analyze the displacements of the particles of a glass-forming molecular liquid perpendicular to a confining solid surface, using extensive molecular dynamics simulations with atomistic models. In the vicinity of an attractive surface,…
We introduce a lattice model of glass transition in polymer globules. This model exhibits a novel scenario of ergodicity breaking in which the disjoint regions of phase space do not arise uniformly, but as small chambers whose number…
During development and under normal physiological conditions, biological tissues are continuously subjected to substantial mechanical stresses. In response to large deformations cells in a tissue must undergo multicellular rearrangements in…
Recent studies of cooled oil emulsion droplets uncovered transformations into a host of flattened shapes with straight edges and sharp corners, driven by a partial phase transition of the bulk liquid phase. Here, we explore theoretically…
Cell neighbor exchanges are integral to tissue rearrangements in biology, including development and repair. Often these processes occur via topological T1 transitions analogous to those observed in foams, grains and colloids. However, in…
Treating the epithelium as an incompressible fluid adjacent to a viscoelastic stroma, we find a novel hydrodynamic instability that leads to the formation of protrusions of the epithelium into the stroma. This instability is a candidate for…
Liquid-liquid phase transition (LLPT) in supercooled water has been a long-standing controversial issue. We show simulation results of real stable first-order phase transitions between high and low density liquid (HDL and LDL)-like…
Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many developmental processes that underlie morphogenesis, wound healing, or cancer progression. In such coordinated behaviours, cells are organised in coherent structures and actively…
Morphogenesis, tissue regeneration and cancer invasion involve transitions in tissue morphology. These transitions, caused by collective cell migration (CCM), have been interpreted as active wetting/de-wetting transitions. This phenomenon…
We perform a bidimensional Stokes experiment in an active cellular material: an autonomously migrating monolayer of Madin-Darby Canine Kidney (MDCK) epithelial cells flows around a circular obstacle within a long and narrow channel,…