Related papers: Controlled neighbor exchanges drive glassy behavio…
Dense monolayers of living cells display intriguing relaxation dynamics, reminiscent of soft and glassy materials close to the jamming transition, and migrate collectively when space is available, as in wound healing or in cancer invasion.…
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…
Biological tissues exhibit diverse mechanical and rheological behaviors during morphogenesis. While much is known about tissue phase transitions controlled by structural order and cell mechanics, key questions regarding how tissue-scale…
The relaxation dynamics of glass forming liquids and their structure are influenced in the vicinity of confining walls. In view of the great potential of this effect for applications in those fields of science and industry, where liquids…
Spontaneous onset of a low temperature topologically ordered phase in a 2-dimensional (2D) lattice model of uniaxial liquid crystal (LC) was debated extensively pointing to a suspected underlying mechanism affecting the RG flow near the…
The glassy cytoplasm, crowded with bio-macromolecules, is fluidized in living cells by mechanical energy derived from metabolism. Characterizing the living cytoplasm as a non-equilibrium system is crucial in elucidating the intricate…
We consider the problem of slow activation dynamics in glassy systems undergoing a random first order phase transition. Using an effective potential approach to supercooled liquids, we determine the spectrum of activation barriers for…
Performing molecular dynamics simulations, we investigate the enormous slowdowns of water dynamics when approaching a glass transition or a solid interface. We show that both effects can be described on common grounds within a theoretical…
For several atomistic models of glass formers, at conditions below their glassy dynamics onset temperatures, ${T_\mathrm{o}}$, we use importance sampling of trajectory space to study the structure, statistics and dynamics of excitations…
Cancer is a disease of cellular regulation, often initiated by genetic mutation within cells, and leading to a heterogeneous cell population within tissues. In the competition for nutrients and growth space within the tumors the phenotype…
How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…
Complex interactions between cellular systems and their surrounding extracellular matrices are emerging as important mechanical regulators of cell functions such as proliferation, motility, and cell death, and such cellular systems are…
We present a computer simulation study of a disordered two-dimensional system of localized interacting electrons at thermal equilibrium. It is shown that the configuration of occupied sites within the Coulomb gap persistently changes at…
Reversible switching of the complex network dynamics of proteins is mimicked in selected network glasses and compacted small carbohydrate molecules. Protein transitions occur on long time scales ~ us -ms, evocative of the exponentially…
We present a simple mathematical framework for the description of the dynamics of glassy systems in terms of a random walk in a complex energy landscape pictured as a network of minima. We show how to use the tools developed for the study…
We study a minimal model of a crawling eukaryotic cell with a chemical polarity controlled by a reaction-diffusion mechanism describing Rho GTPase dynamics. The size, shape, and speed of the cell emerge from the combination of the chemical…
We examine the structural relaxation of glassy materials at finite temperatures, considering the effect of activated rearrangements and long-range elastic interactions. Our three-dimensional mesoscopic relaxation model shows how the…
Characterizing the local structural evolution is an essential step in understanding the nature of glass transition. In this work, we probe the evolution of Voronoi cell geometry in simple glass models, and find that the individual particle…
The Vertex Model for epithelia models the apical surface of the tissue by a tiling, with polygons representing cells and edges representing cell-cell junctions. The mechanics are described by an energy governed by deviations from a target…
The K\"arger model and its derivatives have been widely used to incorporate transcytolemmal water exchange rate, an essential characteristic of living cells, into analyses of diffusion MRI (dMRI) signals from tissues. The K\"arger model…