Related papers: Morphologies of compressed active epithelial monol…
The actin cytoskeleton of adherent tissue cells often condenses into filament bundles contracted by myosin motors, so-called stress fibers, which play a crucial role in the mechanical interaction of cells with their environment. Stress…
The elastic moduli of four numerical random isotropic packings of Hertzian spheres are studied. The four samples are assembled with different preparation procedures, two of which aim to reproduce experimental compaction by vibration and…
Willis dynamic homogenization theory revealed that the effective linear momentum of elastic composites is coupled to their effective strain. % This result, which is partially due to asymmetry at the subwavelength scale, implies that…
During the spreading of epithelial tissues, the advancing tissue front often develops fingerlike protrusions. Their resemblance to traditional viscous fingering patterns in driven fluids suggests that epithelial fingers could arise from an…
We present a generic framework for modelling three-dimensional deformable shells of active matter that captures the orientational dynamics of the active particles and hydrodynamic interactions on the shell and with the surrounding…
We numerically investigate the morphology and disclination line dynamics of active nematic droplets in three dimensions. Although our model only incorporates the simplest possible form of achiral active stress, active nematic droplets…
We showed that a wetting layer in epitaxially strained thin films which decreases with increasing lattice mismatch strain arises due to the variation of nonlinear elastic free energy with film thickness. We calculated how and at what…
Migratory and tissue resident cells exhibit highly branched morphologies to perform their function and to adapt to the microenvironment. Immune cells, for example, display transient branched shapes while exploring the surrounding tissues.…
Disordered soft materials, such as fibrous networks in biological contexts exhibit a nonlinear elastic response. We study such nonlinear behavior with a minimal model for networks on lattice geometries with simple Hookian elements with…
The phonon band structure of monolayer MoS2 is characteristic for a large energy gap between acoustic and optical branches, which protects the vibration of acoustic modes from being scattered by optical phonon modes. Therefore, the phonon…
We theoretically investigate the dynamics of a floating lipid bilayer membrane coupled with a two-dimensional cytoskeleton network, taking into explicitly account the intermonolayer friction, the discrete lattice structure of the…
The apparently intractable shape of a fold in a compressed elastic film lying on a fluid substrate is found to have an exact solution. Such systems buckle at a nonzero wavevector set by the bending stiffness of the film and the weight of…
We study theoretically the shapes of biological tubes affected by various pathologies. When epithelial cells grow at an uncontrolled rate, the negative tension produced by their division provokes a buckling instability. Several shapes are…
Thin elastic sheets and membranes are known to wrinkle when they are stretched -- the associated physics is highly non-linear. The mechanics of thin films that exhibit unusual behavior upon stretching, when they possess auxetic structure,…
Intricate fluid displacement patterns, arising from the unstable growth of interfacial perturbations, can be driven by fluid viscoelasticity and surface tension. A soft glassy suspension ages, $i.e.$ its mechanical moduli evolve with time,…
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
Contact-based vibrations play a critical role in the dynamics of granular materials. Significant insights into vibrational granular dynamics have been obtained with reduced-dimensional systems containing macroscale particles. We study…
As an injury heals, an embryo develops, or a carcinoma spreads, epithelial cells systematically change their shape. In each of these processes cell shape is studied extensively, whereas variation of shape from cell-to-cell is dismissed most…
Cross-sections of cell shapes in a tissue monolayer typically resemble a tiling of convex polygons. Yet, examples exist where the polygons are not convex with curved cell-cell interfaces, as seen in the adaxial epidermis. To date,…
Prestress in amorphous solids bears the memory of their formation, and plays a profound role in their mechanical properties, from stiffening or softening elastic moduli to shifting frequencies of vibrational modes, as well as directing…