Related papers: Selective and Collective Actuation in Active Solid…
Active solids combine internal active driving with elasticity to realize states with nonequilibrium mechanics and autonomous motion. They are often studied in overdamped settings, e.g., in soft materials, and the role of inertia is less…
The collective action of actively contractile units embedded in elastic biopolymer networks plays a crucial role in regulating the network's macroscopic mechanical response. Here, we investigate how the macroscopic boundary stress in model…
Flow networks are fundamental for understanding systems such as animal and plant vasculature or power distribution grids. These networks can encode, transmit, and transform information embodied in the spatial and temporal distribution of…
In biological systems, active agents such as actomyosin and cells move and interact on curved surfaces, exhibiting diverse phenomena. These observations have motivated studies of how curvature shapes their collective behavior. Here, using a…
Active systems, from bacterial suspensions to cellular monolayers, are continuously driven out of equilibrium by local injection of energy from their constituent elements and exhibit turbulent-like and chaotic patterns. Here we demonstrate…
Cavitation in solids can be caused by tensile dead-load traction or impulse traction. The two different types of boundary conditions lead to different static and dynamic solutions. In addition, if the material is stochastic, i.e., the model…
Living cells dynamically modulate the local morphologies of their actin cytoskeletons to perform biological functions, including force transduction, intracellular transport, and cell division. A major challenge is to understand how diverse…
A phenomenological description for active bundles of polar filaments is presented. The activity of the bundle results from crosslinks, that induce relative displacements between the aligned filaments. Our generic description is based on…
It has been supposed that the interplay of elasticity and activity plays a key role in triggering the non-equilibrium behaviors in biological systems. However, the experimental model system is missing to investigate the spatiotemporally…
Active matter drives its constituent agents to move autonomously by harnessing free energy, leading to diverse emergent states with relevance to both biological processes and inanimate functionalities. Achieving maximum reconfigurability of…
Active colloids and externally actuated semi-flexible filaments provide basic building blocks for designing autonomously motile micro-machines. Here, we show that a passive semi-flexible filament can be actuated and transported by attaching…
Active cell-junction remodeling is important for tissue morphogenesis, yet its underlying physics is not understood. We study a mechanical model that describes junctions as dynamic active force dipoles. Their instability can trigger cell…
Self-organization is frequently observed in active collectives, from ant rafts to molecular motor assemblies. General principles describing self-organization away from equilibrium have been challenging to identify. We offer a unifying…
Collective decision-making arises from individual agents integrating their own personal observations with information obtained from social partners. In many biological systems that exhibit collective decision-making, the process by which…
Swimmers and self-propelled particles are physical models for the collective behaviour and motility of a wide variety of living systems, such as bacteria colonies, bird flocks and fish schools. Such artificial active materials are amenable…
We propose a statistical model for static and sliding friction between rough surfaces. Approximating the contact between rough surfaces by the contact of an ensemble of one-dimensional viscoelastic elements with a rough rigid surface, we…
By systematically varying the mobility of self-propelled particles in a two-dimensional (2D) lattice, we experimentally study the influence of particle mobility on system's collective motion. Our system is intrinsically non-equilibrium due…
The nonlinear mechanics of a flexible elastic rod constrained at its edges by a pair of sliding sleeves is analyzed. The planar equilibrium configurations of this variable-length elastica are found to have shape defined only by the…
A system comprised of an elastic solid and its response to an external random force sequence is shown to behave based on the principles of the theory of algorithmic complexity and randomness. The solid distorts the randomness of an input…
Magnetic-responsive composites that consist of soft matrix embedded with hard-magnetic particles have recently been demonstrated as robust soft active materials for fast-transforming actuation. However, the deformation of the functional…