Related papers: Active extensile stress promotes 3D director orien…
Topological defects are increasingly being identified in various biological systems, where their characteristic flow fields and stress patterns are associated with continuous active stress generation by biological entities. Here, using…
The shapes of epithelial tissues result from a complex interplay of contractile forces in the cytoskeleta of the cells in the tissue, and adhesion forces between them. A host of discrete, cell-based models describe these forces by assigning…
We attempt to give a bird's eye view of the physical mechanisms leading to anomalous relaxation, and the relation of this phenomenon with anomalous diffusion and transport. Whereas in some cases these two notions are indeed deeply related,…
We study the necking dynamics of a filament of complex fluid or soft solid in uniaxial tensile stretching at constant imposed Hencky strain rate $\dot\varepsilon$, by means of linear stability analysis and nonlinear (slender filament)…
We describe the basic properties and consequences of introducing active stresses, with principal direction along the local director, in cholesteric liquid crystals. The helical ground state is found to be linearly unstable to extensile…
The processing of thin-structured materials in a fluidic environment, from nearly inextensible but flexible graphene sheets to highly extensible polymer films, arises in many applications. So far, little is known about the dynamics of such…
We propose an agent-based model of active flexible rods. Inspired by cytoskeletal flows, we introduce activity by an internal flow that contributes to the dissipative forces. The active force between our agents is central and reciprocal,…
We report simulations of a continuum model for (apolar, flow aligning) active fluids in two dimensions. Both free and anchored boundary conditions are considered, at parallel confining walls that are either static or moving at fixed…
We analyze a model of mutually-propelled filaments suspended in a two-dimensional solvent. The system undergoes a mean-field isotropic-nematic transition for large enough filament concentrations and the nematic order parameter is allowed to…
Confining a liquid crystal imposes topological constraints on the orientational order, allowing global control of equilibrium systems by manipulation of anchoring boundary conditions. In this article, we investigate whether a similar…
In 3D nematic liquid crystals, disclination lines have a range of geometric structures. Locally, they may resemble $+1/2$ or $-1/2$ defects in 2D nematic phases, or they may have 3D twist. Here, we analyze the structure in terms of the…
We use numerical simulations to investigate the hydrodynamic behavior of the interface between nematic (N) and isotropic (I) phases of a confined active liquid crystal. At low activities, a stable interface with constant shape and velocity…
Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…
We examine the scaling with activity of the emergent length scales that control the nonequilibrium dynamics of an active nematic liquid crystal, using two popular hydrodynamic models that have been employed in previous studies. In both…
We investigate the stress-driven morphological instability of epitaxially growing multilayer films, which are coherent and dislocation-free. We construct a direct elastic analysis, from which we determine the elastic state of the system…
Nematic solids respond strongly to changes in ambient heat or light, significantly differently parallel and perpendicular to the director. This phenomenon is well characterized for uniform director fields, but not for defect textures. We…
Active stresses, which are collectively generated by the motion of energy-consuming rod-like constituents, generate chaotic autonomous flows. Controlling active stresses in space and time is an essential prerequisite for controlling the…
Active fluids exhibit complex turbulent-like flows at low Reynolds number. Recent work predicted that 2d active nematic turbulence follows universal scaling laws. However, experimentally testing these predictions is conditioned by the…
Liquids spreading over a solid substrate under the action of various forces are known to exhibit a long wavelength contact line instability. We use an example of thermally driven spreading on a horizontal surface to study how the stability…
We use nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations to verify recent tube-model predictions that associative polymer networks exhibit broad stretch fluctuations during elongational flow. Simulations further show that these fluctuating…