Related papers: Tension-controlled switch between collective actua…
Wetting of liquid droplets on passive surfaces is ubiquitous in our daily lives, and the governing physical laws are well-understood. When surfaces become active, however, the governing laws of wetting remain elusive. Here we propose…
Elastic active matter or active solid consists of self-propelled units embedded in an elastic matrix. Active solid resists deformation; the shape-preserving property and the intrinsic non-equilibrium nature make active solids a superior…
Despite the fundamental importance of solid--solid transitions for metallurgy, ceramics, earth science, reconfigurable materials, and colloidal matter, the details of how materials transform between two solid structures are poorly…
Collective motion is a manifestation of emergent phenomena in medium-heavy and heavy nuclei. A relatively large number of constituent nucleons contribute coherently to nuclear excitations (vibrations, rotations) that are characterized by…
Whether live cell membranes show miscibility phase transitions (MPTs), and if so, how they fluctuate near the transitions remain outstanding unresolved issues in physics and biology alike. Motivated by these questions we construct a generic…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
In this paper, we investigate experimentally the non-equilibrium steady state of an active colloidal suspension under gravity field. The active particles are made of chemically powered colloids, showing self propulsion in the presence of an…
We analyse a one-dimensional model of hard particles, within ensembles of trajectories that are conditioned (or biased) to atypical values of the time-averaged dynamical activity. We analyse two phenomena that are associated with these…
Self-propulsion allows living systems to display unusual collective behavior. Unlike passive systems in thermal equilibrium, active matter systems are not constrained by conventional thermodynamic laws. A question arises however as to what…
Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…
Topological defects play a central role in the physics of many materials, including magnets, superconductors and liquid crystals. In active fluids, defects become autonomous particles that spontaneously propel from internal active stresses…
Active particle systems are a class of non-equilibrium systems composed of self-propelled Brownian particles; through interactions between particles within the system, a variety of intriguing collective behaviors can emerge. Based on…
From hydrogels and plastics to liquid crystals, soft solids cover a wide array of synthetic and biological materials that play key enabling roles in advanced technologies such as 3D printing, soft robotics, wearable electronics,…
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…
Active nematics are an important new paradigm in soft condensed matter systems. They consist of rod-like components with an internal driving force pushing them out of equilibrium. The resulting fluid motion exhibits chaotic advection, in…
The appearance of emergent symmetries in complex systems with components that can form composite units provides us with opportunities for design and control of exotic phase behaviour, for example by exploiting the dynamical symmetry…
The theoretical understanding of active matter, which is driven out of equilibrium by directed motion, is still fragmental and model oriented. Stochastic thermodynamics, on the other hand, is a comprehensive theoretical framework for driven…
Designing microscopic and nanoscopic self-propelled particles and characterising their motion has become a major scientific challenge over the past decades. To this purpose, phoretic effects, namely propulsion mechanisms relying on local…
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…
Phase transitions and collective dynamics of active colloidal suspensions are fascinating topics in soft matter physics, particularly for out-of-equilibrium systems, which can lead to rich rheological behaviours in the presence of steady…