Related papers: Contractility-induced phase separation in active s…

Phase separation can drive spatial organization of multicomponent mixtures. For instance in developing animal embryos, effective phase separation descriptions have been used to account for the spatial organization of different tissue types.…

The dynamics of active matter driven by interacting molecular motors has a non-potential structure at the local scale. However, we show that there exists a quasi-potential effectively describing the collective self-organization of the…

Phase separation, the spontaneous segregation of density, is a ubiquitous phenomenon observed across diverse physical and biological systems. Within a crowd of motile elements, active phase separation emerges from the interplay of activity…

Contractile forces are essential for many developmental processes involving cell shape change and tissue deformation. Recent experiments on reconstituted actomyosin networks, the major component of the contractile machinery, have shown that…

Active matter is not only indispensable to our understanding of diverse biological processes, but also provides a fertile ground for discovering novel physics. Many emergent properties impossible for equilibrium systems have been…

The influence of immobile filler particles (spheres, fibers, platelets) on polymer blend phase separation is investigated computationally using a generalization of the Cahn-Hilliard-Cook (CHC) model. Simulation shows that the selective…

We present a continuum model of the coupling between cells and substrate that accounts for some of the observed substrate-stiffness dependence of cell properties. The cell is modeled as an elastic active gel, adapting recently developed…

Collective actuation in active solids - the spontaneous coherent excitation of a few vibrational modes - emerges from a feedback between structural deformations and the orientation of active forces. It is an excellent candidate as a basic…

Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many developmental processes that underlie morphogenesis, wound healing, or cancer progression. In such coordinated behaviours, cells are organised in coherent structures and actively…

Living cells dynamically modulate the local morphologies of their actin cytoskeletons to perform biological functions, including force transduction, intracellular transport, and cell division. A major challenge is to understand how diverse…

Colloidal particles moving in a fluid interact via the induced velocity field. The collective dynamic state for a class of actively forced colloids, driven by harmonic potentials via a rule that couples forces to configurations, to perform…

Essentially all biology is active and dynamic. Biological entities autonomously sense, com- pute, and respond using energy-coupled ratchets that can produce force and do work. The cytoskeleton, along with its associated proteins and motors,…

We study the phase behavior of hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates using extensive computer simulations. We determine the full equilibrium phase diagram for arbitrary densities and plate separations from one to five…

The kinetic separation of repulsive active Brownian particles into a dense and a dilute phase is analyzed using a systematic coarse-graining strategy. We derive an effective Cahn-Hilliard equation on large length and time scales, which…

In this work we identify and investigate a novel bifurcation in conserved systems. This secondary bifurcation stops active phase separation in its nonlinear regime. It is then either replaced by an extended, system-filling, spatially…

Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…

The mathematical modeling of the contraction of a muscle is a crucial problem in biomechanics. Several different models of muscle activation exist in literature. A possible approach to contractility is the so-called active strain: it is…

Cell motility in higher organisms (eukaryotes) is crucial to biological functions ranging from wound healing to immune response, and also implicated in diseases such as cancer. For cells crawling on hard surfaces, significant insights into…

Developing tissues often maintain mechanical coherence while continuously remodeling through cellular processes such as cell divisions and rearrangements. In this way, they are an example of amorphous solids. In passive amorphous solids,…

We explore phase separation and kinetic arrest in a model active colloidal system consisting of self-propelled, hard-core particles with nonconvex shapes. The passive limit of the model, namely cross-shaped particles on a square lattice,…