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Active matter is naturally out of equilibrium which results in the emergence of diverse dynamic steady states, including the omnipresent chaotic state known as the active turbulence. However, much less is known how active systems…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-04-07 Nika Kralj , Miha Ravnik , Žiga Kos

Active matter is characterized by its ability to induce motion by self-generated stress. In the case of a solid, such motion can lead to shape transformations. The stress-generating components can be anisotropic endowing the material with…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-05-16 D. J. G. Pearce , S. Gat , G. Livne , A. Bernheim-Groswasser , K. Kruse

The hydrodynamic theory of active nematics has been often used to describe the spatio-temporal dynamics of cell flows and motile topological defects within soft confluent tissues. Those theories, however, often rely on the assumption that…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-08-15 Ioannis Hadjifrangiskou , Liam J. Ruske , Julia M. Yeomans

Active nematics contain topological defects which under sufficient activity move, create and annihilate in a chaotic quasi-steady state, called active turbulence. However, understanding active defects under confinement is an open challenge,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-10-02 Simon Čopar , Jure Aplinc , Žiga Kos , Slobodan Žumer , Miha Ravnik

The self-propulsion of +1/2 topological defects is a hallmark of active nematic fluids, where the defects are advected by the flow field they themselves generate. In this paper we propose a minimal model for defect self-propulsion in a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-08-08 Fridtjof Brauns , Myles O'Leary , Arthur Hernandez , Mark J. Bowick , M. Cristina Marchetti

We characterise the particlelike kinematics of charge-carrying topological defects in nematic media via a geometric field theory. This differs from the theory of electromagnetism, with which it is often compared, due to the absence of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-22 Joseph Pollard , Richard G. Morris

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-11-09 Lasse Bonn , Aleksandra Ardaseva , Romain Mueller , Tyler N. Shendruk , Amin Doostmohammadi

To enhance the understanding of the behavior of active nematic, it is important to understand the behavior of topological defects. In this paper, we study the configuration of topological defects of a two-dimensional active nematic around a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-02-16 Hiroki Matsukiyo , Jun-ichi Fukuda

We consider active nematodynamics on deformable surfaces. Based on a thermodynamically consistent surface Beris-Edwards model we add nematic activity and focus on the emerging additional coupling mechanism between the nematic field, the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-05-24 Ingo Nitschke , Axel Voigt

Topological defects play a central role in the formation and organization of various biological systems. Historically, such nonequilibrium defects have been mainly studied in the context of homogeneous active nematics. Phase-separated…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-07-13 Timo Krüger , Ivan Maryshev , Erwin Frey

Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…

Disclination lines in three-dimensional nematic liquid crystals generically form closed loops whose topology is classified by homotopy theory. While this classification successfully captures global topological features, it does not encode…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-27 F. Aprile , A. J. H. Houston , G. Gonnella , D. Marenduzzo , T. N. Shendruk , G. Negro

Active fluids display spontaneous turbulent-like flows known as active turbulence. Recent work revealed that these flows have universal features, independent of the material properties and of the presence of topological defects. However,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-03-19 Ido Lavi , Ricard Alert , Jean-François Joanny , Jaume Casademunt

The growing interest in active nematics and the emerging evidence of the relevance of topological defects in biology asks for reliable data analysis tools to identify, classify and track such defects in simulation and microscopy data. We…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-02-10 Dennis Wenzel , Michael Nestler , Sebastian Reuther , Maximilian Simon , Axel Voigt

In two dimensional nematics, topological defects are point like singularities with both a charge and a phase. We study topological defects within curved nematic textures on the surface of a cylinder. This allows us to isolate the effect of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-05-10 Daniel J. G. Pearce

Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…

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…

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-05-11 Luiza Angheluta , Zhitao Chen , M. Cristina Marchetti , Mark J. Bowick

We propose a reaction-diffusion system that converts topological information of an active nematic into chemical signals. We show that a curvature-activated reaction dipole is sufficient for creating a system that dynamically senses topology…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-01-09 Michael M. Norton , Piyush Grover

We study a continuum model of an extensile active nematic to show that mesoscale turbulence develops in two stages: (i) ordered regions undergo an intrinsic hydrodynamic instability generating walls, lines of stong bend deformations, (ii)…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-06-18 Sumesh P. Thampi , Ramin Golestanian , Julia M. Yeomans