Related papers: Controlled neighbor exchanges drive glassy behavio…

The dynamics of a dense binary mixture of soft dumbbells, each subject to an active propulsion force and thermal fluctuations, shows a sudden arrest, first to a translational then to a rotational glass, as one reduces temperature $T$ or the…

Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…

Tracking experiments in dense biological tissues reveal a diversity of sources f or local energy injection at the cell scale. The effect of cell motility has been largely studied, but much less is known abo ut the effect of the observed…

We cast the metabolism of interacting cells within a statistical mechanics framework considering both, the actual phenotypic capacities of each cell and its interaction with its neighbors. Reaction fluxes will be the components of…

Cellular decision making allows cells to assume functionally different phenotypes in response to microenvironmental cues, without genetic change. It is an open question, how individual cell decisions influence the dynamics at the tissue…

The dynamics of many glassy systems are known to exhibit string-like hopping motions each consisting of a line of particles displacing one and other. By using molecular dynamics simulations of glassy polymers, we show that these motions…

Vitrimers are a relatively new class of polymeric materials containing associative covalent dynamic bonds that make them recyclable by design. However, the fundamental mechanisms controlling their viscoelastic properties remain poorly…

We explore the glassy dynamics of soft colloids using microgels and charged particles interacting by steric and screened Coulomb interactions, respectively. In the supercooled regime, the structural relaxation time $\tau_\alpha$ of both…

Plants have developed intricate mechanisms to adapt to changing light conditions. Besides photo- and helio- tropism -- the differential growth towards light and the diurnal motion with respect to sunlight -- chloroplast motion acts as a…

We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…

Densely packed, motile bacteria can adopt collective states not seen in conventional, passive materials. These states remain in many ways mysterious, and their physical characterization can aid our understanding of natural bacterial…

We study two dimensional frustrated but non-disordered systems applying a replica approach to a stripe forming model with competing interactions. The phenomenology of the model is representative of several well known systems, like high-Tc…

We study the transient start-up dynamics of a fluidity model which captures the rheological behavior of aging soft glassy materials, in a rectilinear shear flow upon application of step shear rate. We observe that when the steady state flow…

Among the key insights into the glass transition has been the identification of a non-equilibrium phase transition in trajectory space which reveals phase coexistence between the normal supercooled liquid (active phase) and a glassy state…

Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…

Random trajectories of single particles in living cells contain information about the interaction between particles, as well as, with the cellular environment. However, precise consideration of the underlying stochastic properties, beyond…

Transitions between metabasins in supercooled liquids seem to occur through rapid "democratic" collective particle rearrangements. Here we show that this apparent homogeneous particle motion is a direct consequence of dynamic facilitation.…

Multicellular tissues are the building blocks of many biological systems and organs. These tissues are not static, but dynamically change over time. Even if the overall structure remains the same there is a turnover of cells within the…

Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…

Control of cell proliferation is a fundamental aspect of tissue physiology central to morphogenesis, wound healing and cancer. Although many of the molecular genetic factors are now known, the system level regulation of growth is still…