Related papers: Tuneable defect-curvature coupling and topological…
The topological properties of many materials are central to their behavior, with the dynamics of topological defects being particularly important to intrinsically out-of-equilibrium, active materials. In this paper, local manipulation of…
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…
We investigate the influence of curvature and topology on crystalline wrinkling patterns in generic elastic bilayers. Our numerical analysis predicts that the total number of defects created by adiabatic compression exhibits universal…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
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…
Colloidal inclusions in nematic fluids induce topological defects that govern their dynamics. These defects create well-understood rheological behavior in passive nematics, but the interplay between colloid-associated defects and…
Crystallography typically studies collections of point particles whose interaction forces are the gradient of a potential. Lifting this assumption generically gives rise in the continuum limit to a form of elasticity with additional moduli…
The dynamics of active smectic liquid crystals confined on a spherical surface is explored through an active phase field crystal model. Starting from an initially randomly perturbed isotropic phase, several types of topological defects are…
Biological surfaces, such as developing epithelial tissues, exhibit in-plane polar or nematic order and can be strongly curved. Recently, integer (+1) topological defects have been identified as morphogenetic hotspots in living systems.…
Field theories predict that phase transitions sequentially breaking continuous and discrete symmetries can generate hybrid topological structures in which defects of different dimensionalities merge. We report experimental and numerical…
We establish how active stress globally affects the morphology of disclination lines of a three dimensional active nematic liquid crystal under chaotic flow. Thanks to a defect detection algorithm based on the local nematic orientation, we…
Topological defects are singularities within a field that cannot be removed by continuous transformations. The definition of these irregularities requires an ordered reference configuration, calling into question whether they exist in…
We consider the derivation and numerical solution of the flow of passive and active polar liquid crystals, whose molecular orientation is subjected to a tangential anchoring on an evolving curved surface. The underlying passive model is a…
Flagellated microswimmers B. Subtilis dispersed in a nematic phase of a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal form a living liquid crystal (LLC). The combination of the passive and active components allows us to analyze how the active…
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…
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…
We describe the flows and morphological dynamics of topological defect lines and loops in three-dimensional active nematics and show, using theory and numerical modelling, that they are governed by the local profile of the orientational…
When considering flows in biological membranes, they are usually treated as flat, though more often than not, they are curved surfaces, even extremely curved, as in the case of the endoplasmic reticulum. Here, we study the topological…
We numerically investigate how spatial variations of extensile or contractile active stress affect bulk active nematic systems in two and three dimensions. In the absence of defects, activity gradients drive flows which re-orient the…
The role of applied fields on the structure of liquid crystals confined to shell geometries has been studied in past theoretical work, providing strategies to produce liquid crystal shells with controlled defect structure or valence.…