Related papers: Active extensile stress promotes 3D director orien…
In nature interactions between biopolymers and motor proteins give rise to biologically essential emergent behaviours. Besides cytoskeleton mechanics, active nematics arise from such interactions. Here we present a study on 3D active…
In the context of finite elasticity, we propose plate models describing the spontaneous bending of nematic elastomer thin films due to variations along the thickness of the nematic order parameters. Reduced energy functionals are deduced…
The asymptotic derivation of a new family of one-dimensional, weakly nonlinear and weakly dispersive equations that model the flow of an ideal fluid in an elastic vessel is presented. Dissipative effects due to the viscous nature of the…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
Lattice Monte-Carlo simulations were performed to study the equilibrium ordering in a two-dimensional nematic system with quenched random disorder. When the disordering field, which competes against the aligning effect of the Frank…
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…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…
We investigate the hydrodynamic stability and the formation of patterns in a continuum model of epithelial layers, able to account for the interplay between mechanical activity, lateral adhesion and the $6-$fold orientational order…
Suspensions of active agents with nematic interactions exhibit complex spatio-temporal dynamics such as mesoscale turbulence. Since the Reynolds number of microscopic flows is very small on the scale of individual agents, inertial effects…
We study the dynamics of active nematic films on a substrate driven by active flows with or without the incompressible constraint.Through simulations and theoretical analysis, we show that arch patterns are stable in the compressible case,…
During animal development and homeostasis, the structure of tissues, including muscles, blood vessels and connective tissues adapts to mechanical strains in the extracellular matrix (ECM). These strains originate from the differential…
We study thermal relaxation in ordered arrays of coupled nonlinear elements with external driving. We find, that our model exhibits dynamic self-organization manifested in a universal stretched-exponential form of relaxation. We identify…
We consider a continuum model of active viscoelastic matter, whereby an active nematic liquid-crystal is coupled to a minimal model of polymer dynamics with a viscoelastic relaxation time $\tau_C$. To explore the resulting interplay between…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked polymer networks covalently bonded with liquid crystal mesogens. In the nematic phase, due to strong coupling between mechanical strain and orientational order, these materials display…
Actin filaments, crosslinkers and myosin molecular motors form contractile networks. For instance, the cell cortex is a thin network below the cell membrane ; contraction of the cell cortex allows cells to round up during cell division.…
We experimentally and numerically investigate the flow of a Newtonian fluid through a constricted geometry for Reynolds numbers in the range $0.1 - 100$. The major aim is to study non-linear inertia effects at larger Reynolds numbers (>10)…
We present a generic model of cell motility generated by acto-myosin contraction of the cell cortex. We identify analytically dynamical instabilities of the cortex and show that they trigger spontaneous cortical flows which in turn can…
We study a reconstituted composite system consisting of an active microtubule network interdigitated with a passive network of entangled F-actin filaments. Increasing viscoelasticity of the F-actin network controls the emergent dynamics,…
A strained epitaxial film deposited on a deformable substrate undergoes a morphological instability relaxing the elastic energy by surface diffusion. The nonlinear and nonlocal dynamical equations of such films with wetting interactions are…
"Active nematics" are orientationally ordered but apolar fluids composed of interacting constituents individually powered by an internal source of energy. When activity exceeds a system-size dependent threshold, spatially uniform active…