Related papers: Defect Loops in Three-Dimensional Active Nematics …
The swimming of cells, far from any boundary, can arise in the absence of long-range liquid-crystalline order within the cytoplasm, but simple models of this effect are lacking. Here we present a two-dimensional model of droplet…
In active materials, uncoordinated internal stresses lead to emergent long-range flows. An understanding of how the behavior of active materials depends on mesoscopic (hydrodynamic) parameters is developing, but there remains a gap in…
The Kosterlitz-Thouless and the Hexatic phase transitions are celebrated examples of dipole (vortex, dislocation) induced transitions in condensed matter physics. For very clear reasons, these important ``topological" transitions are…
Defects and impurities strongly affect the timing and the character of the (re)ordering or disordering transitions of thermodynamic systems captured in metastable states. In this paper we analyze the case of two-dimensional magnetic…
Earlier, Chicone, Latushkin and Montgomery-Smith [Comm Math Phys (1997)] have proved the existence of a fast dynamo operator, in compact two-dimensional manifold, as long as its Riemannian curvature be constant and negative. More recently…
Several types of active agents self-propel by spinning around their propulsion axis, thus behaving as active screws. Examples include cytoskeletal filaments in gliding assays, magnetically-driven colloidal helices, and microorganisms like…
Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…
Chirality is a recurrent theme in the study of biological systems, in which active processes are driven by the internal conversion of chemical energy into work. Bacterial flagella, acto-myosin filaments and microtubule bundles are active…
It has been shown that an anisotropic liquid crystalline (LC) environment can be used to guide the self-propulsion dynamics of dispersed microswimmers, such as bacteria. This type of composite system is named "living nematic" (LN). In the…
In the last years self-motile droplets attracted the attention of scientists from different fields ranging from applied biology to theoretical physics, because of their promising technological applications and important biological…
Active polar fluids exhibit spontaneous flow when sufficient active stress is generated by internal molecular mechanisms. This is also referred to as an active Fr\'{e}edericksz transition. Experiments have revealed the existence of…
We present an asymptotic theory for solving the dynamics of slender autophoretic loops and knots. Our formulation is valid for non-intersecting 3D centrelines, with arbitrary chemical patterning and varying (circular) cross-sectional…
Self-propelling organisms locomote via generation of patterns of self-deformation. Despite the diversity of body plans, internal actuation schemes and environments in limbless vertebrates and invertebrates, such organisms often use similar…
We review progress in active hydrodynamic descriptions of flowing media on curved and deformable manifolds: the state-of-the-art in continuum descriptions of single-layers of epithelial and/or other tissues during development. First, after…
Topological defects are a universal concept across many disciplines, such as crystallography, liquid-crystalline physics, low-temperature physics, cosmology, and even biology. In nematic liquid crystals, topological defects called…
In this paper, we have obtained motion equations for a wide class of one-dimensional singularities in 2-D ideal hydrodynamics. The simplest of them, are well known as point vortices. More complicated singularities correspond to vorticity…
Motivated by diverse phenomena in cellular biophysics, including bacterial flagellar motion and DNA transcription and replication, we study the overdamped nonlinear dynamics of a rotationally forced filament with twist and bend elasticity.…
The structure and dynamics of important biological quasi-two-dimensional systems, ranging from cytoskeletal gels to tissues, are controlled by nematic order, flow, defects and activity. Continuum hydrodynamic descriptions combined with…
The mechanical properties of crystals on curved substrates mix elastic, geometric and topological degrees of freedom. In order to elucidate the properties of such crystals we formulate the low-energy effective action that combines metric…
We study the three-dimensional spontaneous flow transition of an active nematic in an infinite slab geometry using a combination of numerics and analytics. We show that it is determined by the interplay of two eigenmodes -- called S- and…