Related papers: Active nematic defects and epithelial morphogenesi…

It is increasingly being realized that liquid-crystalline features can play an important role in the properties and dynamics of cell monolayers. Here, we present a cell-based model of cell layers, based on the phase-field formulation, that…

Orientational order, encoded in anisotropic fields, plays an important role during the development of an organism. A striking example of this is the freshwater polyp Hydra, where topological defects in the muscle fiber orientation have been…

Neurites, the long cellular protrusions that form the routes of the neuronal network are capable to actively extend during early morphogenesis or to regenerate after trauma. To perform this task, they rely on their cytoskeleton for…

Continuum models of active nematic gels have proved successful to describe a number of biological systems consisting of a population of rodlike motile subunits in a fluid environment. However, in order to get a thorough understanding of the…

Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…

Nucleation and growth is the dominant relaxation mechanism driving first order phase transitions. In two-dimensional at systems nucleation has been applied to a wide range of problems in physics, chemistry and biology. Here we study…

A wide range of living and artificial active matter exists in close contact with substrates and under strong confinement, where in addition to dipolar active stresses, quadrupolar active stresses can become important. Here, we numerically…

We study the collective dynamics of self-propelled rods in an inhomogeneous motility field. At the interface between two regions of constant but different motility, a smectic rod layer is spontaneously created through aligning interactions…

The motion of topological defects is an important feature of the dynamics of all liquid crystals, and is especially conspicuous in active liquid crystals. Understanding defect motion is a challenging theoretical problem, because the…

From incompressible flows to electrostatics, harmonic functions can provide solutions to many two-dimensional problems and, similarly, the director field of a planar nematic can be determined using complex analysis. We derive a closed-form…

Active soft bodies can affect their shape through an internal actuation mechanism that induces a deformation. Similar to recent work, this paper utilizes a differentiable, quasi-static, and physics-based simulation layer to optimize for…

The presence and significance of active topological defects is increasingly realised in diverse biological and biomimetic systems. We introduce a continuum model of polar active matter, based on conservation laws and symmetry arguments,…

We investigate the turbulent dynamics of a two-dimensional active nematic liquid crystal con- strained on a curved surface. Using a combination of hydrodynamic and particle-based simulations, we demonstrate that the fundamental structural…

We study the equilibrium shapes of vesicles, with an in-plane nematic order, using a Monte-Carlo scheme and show that highly curved shapes, like tubes and discs, with a striking similarity to the structures engendered by certain curvature…

A body immersed in a nematic liquid crystal disturbs the fluid's preferred molecular configuration and increases its stored elastic energy. In an active nematic, the fluid components also generate a stress in the bulk fluid. By introducing…

We investigate the effect of an anisotropic substrate on the turbulent dynamics of a simulated two dimensional active nematic. This is introduced as an anisotropic friction and an effective anisotropic viscosity, with the orientation of the…

In this paper we rigorously investigate the emergence of defects on Nematic Shells with genus different from one. This phenomenon is related to a non trivial interplay between the topology of the shell and the alignment of the director…

Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…

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…

We adapt the Halperin-Mazenko formalism to analyze two-dimensional active nematics coupled to a generic fluid flow. The governing hydrodynamic equations lead to evolution laws for nematic topological defects and their corresponding density…