Related papers: Motile dislocations knead odd crystals into whorls
We study a model colloidal liquid crystal consisting of hard spherocylinders under the influence of an external aligning potential by Langevin dynamics simulation. The external field that rotates in a plane acts on the orientation of the…
Coherent vortical motion has been reported in a wide variety of populations including living organisms (bacteria, fishes, human crowds) and synthetic active matter (shaken grains, mixtures of biopolymers), yet a unified description of the…
Metastable phases may be spontaneously formed from other metastable phases through nucleation. Here we demonstrate the spontaneous formation of a metastable phase from an unstable equilibrium by spinodal decomposition, which leads to a…
The crystalline structure of minerals due to the highly ordered assembly of its constituent atoms, ions or molecules confers a considerable hardness and brittleness to the materials. As a result, they are generally subject to fracture. Here…
When the discrete time-translation symmetry of isolated, periodically driven systems is spontaneously broken, a new phase of matter can emerge. We review some recent developments on both the theoretical underpinnings and experimental…
Intriguing analogies were found between a model of plastic deformation in crystals and turbulence in fluids. A study of this model provides remarkable explanations of known experiments and predicts fractal dislocation pattern formation.…
Understanding the out-of equilibrium behaviour of point defects in crystals, yields insights into the nature and fragility of the ordered state, as well as being of great practical importance. In some rare cases defects are spontaneously…
Biological active matter like the cytoskeleton or tissues are characterized by their ability to transform chemical energy into mechanical stress. In addition, it often exhibits orientational order, which is essential for many cellular and…
Colloidal particles are considered ideal building blocks to produce materials with enhanced physical properties. The state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing these particles provide control over shape, size, and directionality of the…
A microscopic field theory for crystallization in active systems is proposed which unifies the phase-field-crystal model of freezing with the Toner-Tu theory for self-propelled particles. A wealth of different active crystalline states are…
How do flocks, herds and swarms proceed through disordered environments? This question is not only crucial to animal groups in the wild, but also to virtually all applications of collective robotics, and active materials composed of…
Freezing of charged colloids on square or triangular two-dimensional periodic substrates has been recently shown to realize a rich variety of orientational orders. We propose a theoretical framework to analyze the corresponding structures.…
When metals are magnetized, emulsions phase separate, or galaxies cluster, domain walls and patterns form and irremediably coarsen over time. Such coarsening is universally driven by diffusive relaxation toward equilibrium. Here, we…
We investigate stresses and particle motion during the start up of flow in a colloidal dispersion close to arrest into a glassy state. A combination of molecular dynamics simulation, mode coupling theory and confocal microscopy experiment…
Starting from a microscopic multiparticle Langevin equation, we systematically derive a hydrodynamic description in terms of density and momentum fields for chiral active particles interacting via standard repulsive and nonlocal odd forces.…
Using Brownian dynamics computer simulations we show that a two-dimensional suspension of self-propelled ("active") colloidal particles crystallizes at sufficiently high densities. Compared to the equilibrium freezing of passive particles…
Collective motion of dislocations is governed by the obstacles they encounter. In pure crystals, dislocations form complex structures as they become jammed by their anisotropic shear stress fields. On the other hand, introducing disorder to…
The effective interactions between the constituents of driven soft matter generically defy Newton's third law. Combining theory and numerical simulations, we establish that six classes of mechanics with no counterparts in equilibrium…
In colloidal suspensions, self-organization processes can be easily fueled by external fields. One particularly interesting class of phenomena occurs in monolayers of dipolar particles that are driven by rotating external fields. Here we…
Following recent evidence that the vortices in decaying two-dimensional turbulence can be classified into small--mobile, and large--quasi-stationary, this paper examines the evidence that the latter might be considered a `crystal' whose…