Related papers: Selective and Collective Actuation in Active Solid…

We investigate numerically, by a hybrid lattice Boltzmann method, the morphology and the dynamics of an emulsion made of a polar active gel, contractile or extensile, and an isotropic passive fluid. We focus on the case of a highly…

The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…

Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…

Active particles contain internal degrees of freedom with the ability to take in and dissipate energy and, in the process, execute systematic movement. Examples include all living organisms and their motile constituents such as molecular…

Aging populations and the rising prevalence of neurological and musculoskeletal disorders increase the demand for wearable mobility assistive devices that are effective, comfortable, and anatomically compatible. Many existing systems use…

A wide range of experimental systems including gliding, swarming and swimming bacteria, in-vitro motility assays as well as shaken granular media are commonly described as self-propelled rods. Large ensembles of those entities display a…

Spontaneous directed motion, a hallmark of cell biology, is unusual in classical statistical physics. Here we study, using both numerical and analytical methods, organized motion in models of the cytoskeleton in which constituents are…

Polar active matter - including animal herds, aggregates of motile cells and active colloids - often forms coordinated migration patterns, such as flocking. This orderly motion can be disrupted by full-integer topological defects…

Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…

Transport phenomena in out-of-equilibrium systems is immensely important in a myriad of applications in biology, engineering and physics. Complex environments, such as the cytoplasm or porous media, can substantially affect the transport…

The motion of the structure determining components is highly collective, both in amorphous solids and in undercooled liquids. This has been deduced from experimental low temperature data in the tunneling regime as well as from the vanishing…

Humans and other animals often follow the decisions made by others because these are indicative of the quality of possible choices, resulting in `social response rules': observed relationships between the probability that an agent will make…

We present an overdamped continuum description of oriented active solids in which interactions respect the symmetries of space but do not obey the principle of action and reaction. Taking position and orientation as kinematic variables, we…

Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…

Active biological flow networks pervade nature and span a wide range of scales, from arterial blood vessels and bronchial mucus transport in humans to bacterial flow through porous media or plasmodial shuttle streaming in slime molds.…

Internal activity can fundamentally reshape the mechanical behavior of solids, yet its role in softening and failure remains incompletely understood. In this study, we investigate spontaneous deformations in activated solids via non-affine…

How can a collection of motile cells, each generating contractile nematic stresses in isolation, become an extensile nematic at the tissue-level? Understanding this seemingly contradictory experimental observation, which occurs irrespective…

While the collective motion of active particles has been studied extensively, effective strategies to navigate particle swarms without external guidance remain elusive. We introduce a method to control the trajectories of two-dimensional…

Recent experiments have led to active colloidal molecules which aggregate from non-motile building blocks and acquire self-propulsion through their non-reciprocal interactions. Here, we model the collective behavior of such active molecules…

Oscillations represent a ubiquitous phenomenon in biological systems. The conventional models of biological periodic oscillations are usually proposed as interconnecting transcriptional feedback loops. Some specific proteins function as…