Related papers: Selective and Collective Actuation in Active Solid…
Natural active systems routinely reshape and reorganize their environments through sustained local interactions. Examples of decentralized collective construction are common in nature, e.g., many insects achieve large-scale constructions…
Collective motion provides a spectacular example of self-organization in Nature. Visual information plays a crucial role among various types of information in determining interactions. Recently, experiments have revealed that organisms such…
Essentially all biology is active and dynamic. Biological entities autonomously sense, com- pute, and respond using energy-coupled ratchets that can produce force and do work. The cytoskeleton, along with its associated proteins and motors,…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
We derive the constitutive equations of an active polar gel from a model for the dynamics of elastic molecules that link polar elements. Molecular binding kinetics induces the fluidization of the material, giving rise to Maxwell…
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…
Active filaments, such as microtubules with attached cargo-carrying motor proteins, are important dynamic structures for fluid transport in and around living cells. The mathematical models of active filaments appearing in the literature…
Biological tissues exhibit diverse mechanical and rheological behaviors during morphogenesis. While much is known about tissue phase transitions controlled by structural order and cell mechanics, key questions regarding how tissue-scale…
We study the dynamics of quasi-two-dimensional concentrated suspensions of colloidal particles in active gels by computer simulations. Remarkably, we find that activity induces a dynamic clustering of colloids even in the absence of any…
The study of active matter has revealed novel non-equilibrium collective behaviors, illustrating their potential as a new materials platform. However, most works treat active matter as unregulated systems with uniform microscopic energy…
Collective decision making using simple social interactions has been studied in many types of multi-agent systems, including robot swarms and human social networks. However, existing multi-agent studies have rarely modeled the neural…
Populations of agents often exhibit surprising collective behavior emerging from simple local interactions. The common belief is that the agents must posses a certain level of cognitive abilities for such an emerging collective behavior to…
Collective motion in actively propelled particle systems is triggered on the very local scale by nucleation of coherently moving units consisting of just a handful of particles. These units grow and merge over time, ending up in a…
The physics of behavior seeks simple descriptions of animal behavior. The field has advanced rapidly by using techniques in low dimensional dynamics distilled from computer vision. Yet, we still do not generally understand the rules which…
Hooke's law states that the forces or stresses experienced by an elastic object are proportional to the applied deformations or strains. The number of coefficients of proportionality between stress and strain, i.e., the elastic moduli, is…
Active matter refers to a broad class of non-equilibrium systems where energy is continuously injected at the level of individual ``particles". These systems exhibit emergent collective behaviors that have no direct thermal-equilibrium…
Living materials such as membranes, cytoskeletal assemblies, cell collectives and tissues can often be described as active solids -- materials that are energized from within, with elastic response about a well defined reference…
We show from experiments and simulations on vibration-activated granular matter that self-propelled polar rods in an elastic medium on a substrate turn and move towards each other. We account for this effective attraction through a…
Cells and microorganisms employ dynamic shape changes to enable steering and avoidance for efficient spatial exploration and collective organization. In contrast, active colloids, their synthetic counterparts, currently lack similar…
Cell crawling crucially depends on the collective dynamics of the acto-myosin cytoskeleton. However, it remains an open question to what extent cell polarization and persistent motion depend on continuous regulatory mechanisms and…