Related papers: Mechanochemical Topological Defects in an Active N…
As a method for controlling active materials, researchers have suggested designing patterns of activity on a substrate, which should guide the motion of topological defects. To investigate this concept, we model the behavior of a single…
Emulsions comprising isotropic fluid drops within a nematic host are of interest for applications ranging from biodetection to smart windows, which rely on changes of molecular alignment structures around the drops in response to chemical,…
Topological invariants have proved useful for analyzing emergent function as they characterize a property of the entire system, and are insensitive to local details, disorder, and noise. They support boundary states, which reduce the system…
The study of reaction-diffusion systems on networks is of paramount relevance for the understanding of nonlinear processes in systems where the topology is intrinsically discrete, such as the brain. Until now reaction-diffusion systems have…
The problem of low Reynolds number turbulence in active nematic fluids is theoretically addressed. Using numerical simulations I demonstrate that an incompressible turbulent flow, in two-dimensional active nematics, consists of an ensemble…
We construct a model to explore the hydrodynamic interactions of active inclusions in curved biological membranes. The curved membrane is modelled as a two dimensional layer of highly viscous fluid, surrounded by external solvents of…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
Coarse-grained, mesoscale simulations are invaluable for studying soft condensed matter because of their ability to model systems in which a background solvent plays a significant role but is not the primary interest. Such methods generally…
Rational control over the periodic arrangement of particles by means of external stimuli is a technologically important aspect of colloidal science with important physical underpinnings. Here, a robust structural control of particle…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
Active systems, from bacterial suspensions to cellular monolayers, are continuously driven out of equilibrium by local injection of energy from their constituent elements and exhibit turbulent-like and chaotic patterns. Here we demonstrate…
The emergence of new techniques for the fabrication of nematic droplets with nontrivial topology provides new routes for the assembly of responsive devices. Here we perform a numerical study of spherical nematic droplets on fibres. We…
Constructing systems that exhibit time-scales much longer than those of the underlying components, as well as emergent dynamical and collective behavior, is a key goal in fields such as synthetic biology and materials self-assembly.…
We investigate Turing instability and pattern formation in two-dimensional domains for two reaction-diffusion models, obtained as diffusive limits of kinetic equations for mixtures of monatomic and polyatomic gases. The first model is of…
The effects of an electric field on the flow patterns and defect dynamics of two-dimensional active nematics are numerically investigated. We found that field-induced director reorientation causes anisotropic active turbulence characterized…
We present a novel framework for the study of disclinations in two-dimensional active nematic liquid crystals, and topological defects in general. The order tensor formalism is used to calculate exact multi-particle solutions of the…
Charge profiles in liquid electrolytes are of crucial importance for applications, such as supercapacitors, fuel cells, batteries, or the self-assembly of particles in colloidal or biological settings. However, creating localised (screened)…
We propose a realistic cold-atom quantum setting where nontrivial energy-band topology induces non-reciprocal pumping. This is an intriguing non-Hermitian phenomenon that illustrates how topology, when assisted with atom loss, can act as a…
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 analyze the phase behavior of lyotropic nematic liquid crystals in the self-organizing flow, viz. so called active nematics (AN). Their elastic properties are mutually caused by evolution of topological defects (for instance,…