Related papers: Autonomous waves and global motion modes in living…

Spontaneously flowing liquids have been successfully engineered from a variety of biological and synthetic self-propelled units. Together with their orientational order, wave propagation in such active fluids have remained a subject of…

Flexible mechanical metamaterials are compliant structures engineered to achieve unique properties via the large deformation of their components. While their static character has been studied extensively, the study of their dynamic…

Materials made from active, living, or robotic components can display emergent properties arising from local sensing and computation. Here, we realize a freestanding active metabeam with piezoelectric elements and electronic feed-forward…

Looking at rational solid-fluid mixture theories in the context of their biomechanical perspectives, this work aims at proposing a two-scale constitutive theory of a poroelastic solid infused with an inviscid compressible fluid. The…

When metals are magnetized, emulsions phase separate, or galaxies cluster, domain walls and patterns form and irremediably coarsen over time. Such coarsening is universally driven by diffusive relaxation toward equilibrium. Here, we…

It is frequent for active or living entities to find themselves embedded in a surrounding medium. Resulting composite systems are usually classified as either active fluids or active solids. Yet, in reality, particularly in the biological…

We show from experiments and simulations on vibration-activated granular matter that self-propelled polar rods in an elastic medium on a substrate turn and move towards each other. We account for this effective attraction through a…

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…

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…

Active matter, exemplified by adaptive living materials such as the actomyosin cytoskeleton, can navigate material parameter space dynamically, leading to unconventional mechanical responses. In particular, it can self-drive toward elastic…

Active matter agents consume internal energy or extract energy from the environment for locomotion and force generation. Already rather generic models, such as ensembles of active Brownian particles, exhibit phenomena, which are absent at…

Over the past decade, autophoretic colloids have emerged as a prototypical system for studying self-propelled motion at microscopic scales, with promising applications in microfluidics, micromachinery, and therapeutics. Their motion in a…

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…

Active matter is a term encompassing particle-based assemblies with some form of self-propulsion, including certain biological systems as well as synthetic systems such as artificial colloidal swimmers, all of which can exhibit a remarkable…

Biofilms are bacterial aggregates encased in a self-produced polymeric matrix which attach to moist surfaces and are extremely resistant to chemicals and antibiotics. Recent experiments show that their structure is defined by the interplay…

Motivated by the experimental ability to produce monodisperse particles in microfluidic devices, we study theoretically the hydrodynamic stability of driven and active crystals. We first recall the theoretical tools allowing to quantify the…

Capturing the emergence of deformation waves in contractile living tissues is a challenge that has recently been tackled with models of actively deformable particles. Inspired by the anisotropic deformation of cardiomyocytes in cardiac…

We study a simple two-dimensional model for motion of an elastic filament subject to internally generated stresses and show that wave-like propagating shapes which can propel the filament can be induced by a self-organized mechanism via a…

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…

Active nematics are materials composed of mobile, elongated particles that can transform energy from the environment into a mechanical motion. Current experimental realizations of the active nematics are of biological origin and include…