Related papers: Amorphous Entangled Active Matter
Recently, long and slender living worms have garnered significant interest because of their impressive ability to exhibit diverse emergent behaviors in highly entangled physical and topological conditions. These worms can form an active…
Many organisms exhibit branching morphologies that twist around each other and become entangled. Entanglement occurs when different objects interlock, creating complex and often irreversible configurations. This physical phenomenon is…
Tangled active filaments are ubiquitous in nature, from chromosomal DNA and cilia carpets to root networks and worm blobs. How activity and elasticity facilitate collective topological transformations in living tangled matter is not well…
Biological and robotic systems often operate in confined environments where material must be gathered without centralized control. Inspired by the effective collection strategies of aquatic worms (Lumbriculus variegatus and Tubifex…
Understanding physical rules underlying collective motions requires perturbation of controllable parameters in self-propelled particles. However, controlling parameters in animals is generally not easy, which makes collective behaviours of…
Collections of simple, self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit complex, emergent dynamical behavior, with promising applications in microrobotics. When confined within a deformable vesicle, self-propelled rods cluster and align,…
Current artificial intelligence systems show near-human-level capabilities when deployed in isolation. Systems of a few collaborating intelligent agents are being engineered to perform tasks collectively. This raises the question of whether…
In recent years the functionality of synthetic active microparticles has edged even closer to that of their biological counterparts. However, we still lack the understanding needed to recreate at the microscale key features of autonomous…
Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…
Active emulsions and liquid crystalline shells are intriguing and experimentally realisable types of topological matter. Here we numerically study the morphology and spatiotemporal dynamics of a double emulsion, where one or two passive…
In equilibrium, the physical properties of matter are set by the interactions between the constituents. In contrast, the energy input of the individual components controls the behavior of synthetic or living active matter. Great progress…
Amorphous solids form an enormous and underutilized class of materials. In order to drive the discovery of new useful amorphous materials further we need to achieve a closer convergence between computational and experimental methods. In…
Systems comprised of self-steering active Brownian particles are studied via simulations for a minimal cognitive flocking model. The dynamics of the active Brownian particles is extended by an orientational response with limited…
Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…
Synthetic active collectives, composed of many nonliving individuals capable of cooperative changes in group shape and dynamics, hold promise for practical applications and for the elucidation of guiding principles of natural collectives.…
Many types of organisms utilize group aggregation as a method for survival. The freshwater oligochaete, California blackworms Lumbriculus variegatus form tightly entangled structures, or worm "blobs", that have adapted to survive in…
Active matter physics and swarm robotics have provided powerful tools for the study and control of ensembles driven by internal sources. At the macroscale, controlling swarms typically utilizes significant memory, processing power, and…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…
Random packings of stiff rods are self-supporting mechanical structures stabilized by long range interactions induced by contacts. To understand the geometrical and topological complexity of the packings, we first deploy X-ray computerized…
Construction throughout history typically assumes that its blueprints and building blocks are pre-determined. However, recent work suggests that alternative approaches can enable new paradigms for structure formation. Aleatory…