Related papers: Self-organization and shape change by active polar…
The ordering of rod-like particles in soft, deformable containers emerges from the interplay of anisotropic interactions, geometric confinement, and boundary compliance. This competition couples internal particle organization to container…
Droplet formation has emerged as an essential concept for the spatiotemporal organisation of biomolecules in cells. However, classical descriptions of droplet dynamics based on passive liquid-liquid phase separation cannot capture the…
Cells are fundamental building blocks of living organisms displaying an array of shapes, morphologies, and textures that encode specific functions and physical behaviors. Elucidating the rules of this code remains a challenge. In this work,…
We simulate the nonlocal Stokesian hydrodynamics of an elastic filament which is active due a permanent distribution of stresslets along its contour. A bending instability of an initially straight filament spontaneously breaks flow symmetry…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
The spontaneous emergence of collective flows is a generic property of active fluids and often leads to chaotic flow patterns characterised by swirls, jets, and topological disclinations in their orientation field. However, the ability to…
We undertake a systematic numerical exploration of self-organized states in a deterministic model of interacting self-propelled particles in two dimensions. In the process, we identify various types of collective motion, namely, disordered…
Ferroelectric nematic phases are a new class of polar fluids in which spontaneous polarization is directly coupled to the orientational order, providing unique opportunities for creating self-organized materils with spatially modulated…
In active matter systems, self-propelled particles can self-organize to undergo collective motion, leading to persistent dynamical behavior out of equilibrium. In cells, cytoskeletal filaments and motor proteins self-organize into complex…
We demonstrate several examples of driving and steering of colloids when dispersed in nematic liquid crystals. The driving mechanism is based on the principle of nonlinear electrophoresis which is mediated by the asymmetry in the structure…
Active nematics are microscopically driven liquid crystals that exhibit dynamical steady states characterized by the creation and annihilation of topological defects. Motivated by experimental realizations of such systems made of biopolymer…
Active nematics are the nonequilibrium analog of passive liquid crystals in which anisotropic units consume free energy to drive emergent behavior. Similar to liquid crystal (LC) molecules in displays, ordering and dynamics in active…
We consider a collection of self-driven apolar particles on a substrate that organize into an active nematic phase at sufficiently high density or low noise. Using the dynamical renormalization group, we systematically study the 2d…
Recent theoretical research has developed a general framework to understand director deformations and modulated phases in nematic liquid crystals. In this framework, there are four fundamental director deformation modes: twist, bend, splay,…
Coupling between flow and orientation is a central issue in understanding the collective dynamics of active biofilaments and cells. Active stresses generated by motor activity destroy (quasi-)long-range orientational order and induce…
We study the vertex model for epithelial tissue mechanics extended to include coupling between the cell shapes and tensions in cell-cell junctions. This coupling represents an active force which drives the system out of equilibrium and…
We present a hydrodynamic model for a thin spherical shell of active nematic liquid crystal with an arbitrary configuration of defects. The active flows generated by defects in the director lead to the formation of stable vortices,…
Recent studies have shown that packings of cells, both eukaryotic cellular tissues and growing or swarming bacterial colonies, can often be understood as active nematic fluids. A key property of volume-conserving active nematic model…
Phase separation can drive spatial organization of multicomponent mixtures. For instance in developing animal embryos, effective phase separation descriptions have been used to account for the spatial organization of different tissue types.…
Topological defects are distinctive signatures of liquid crystals. They profoundly affect the viscoelastic behavior of the fluid by constraining the orientational structure in a way that inevitably requires global changes not achievable…