Related papers: Active matter in a viscoelastic environment
Many active systems display nematic order, while interacting with their environment. In this work, we show theoretically how environment-stored memory acts an effective external field that aligns active nematics. The coupling to the…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is important across biology, physics, and materials science. Although usually studied at equilibrium, active components - such as motor proteins, enzymes, and synthetic microswimmers - are increasingly…
Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…
Swimming bacteria in passive nematics in the form of lyotropic liquid crystals are defined as a new class of active matter known as living liquid crystals in recent studies. It has also been shown that liquid crystal solutions are promising…
Biological cells are able to generate intricate structures and respond to external stimuli, sculpting their membrane from within. Simplified biomimetic systems can aid in understanding the principles which govern these shape changes and…
Active matter exhibits various forms of non-equilibrium states in the absence of external forcing, including macroscopic steady-state currents. Such states are often too complex to be modelled from first principles and our understanding of…
We use a continuum model to examine the effect of activity on a phase separating mixture of an extensile active nematic and a passive fluid. We highlight the distinct role of previously considered interfacial active stresses and bulk active…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…
In active materials, uncoordinated internal stresses lead to emergent long-range flows. An understanding of how the behavior of active materials depends on mesoscopic (hydrodynamic) parameters is developing, but there remains a gap in…
Molecular-motor generated active stresses drive the cytoskeleton away from equilibrium, endowing it with tunable mechanical properties that are essential for diverse functions such as cell division and motility[1-5]. Designing analogous…
Via computer simulations we study kinetics of pattern formation in a two-dimensional active matter system. Self-propulsion in our model is incorporated via the Vicsek-like activity, i.e., particles have the tendency of aligning their…
Developing tissues often maintain mechanical coherence while continuously remodeling through cellular processes such as cell divisions and rearrangements. In this way, they are an example of amorphous solids. In passive amorphous solids,…
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)…
We experimentally study the dynamics of active particles (APs) in a viscoelastic fluid under various geometrical constraints such as flat walls, spherical obstacles and cylindrical cavities. We observe that the main effect of the confined…
The mammalian cell membrane is embedded with biomolecular condensates of protein and lipid clusters, which interact with an underlying viscoelastic cytoskeleton network to organize the cell surface and mechanically interact with the…
In this review we summarize theoretical progress in the field of active matter, placing it in the context of recent experiments. Our approach offers a unified framework for the mechanical and statistical properties of living matter:…
The organization of live cells into tissues and their subsequent biological function involves inter-cell mechanical interactions, which are mediated by their elastic environment. To model this interaction, we consider cells as spherical…
A controllable soft solid is realised in vortex matter in a type II superconductor. The two-dimensional unit cell area can be varied by a factor of $10^4$ in the solid phase, without a change of crystal symmetry offering easy exploration of…
Active turbulence in dense active systems is characterized by high vorticity on a length scale that is large compared to that of individual entities. We describe the properties of active turbulence as momentum propagation is screened by…
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…