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How thousands of microtubules and molecular motors self-organize into spindles remains poorly understood. By combining static, nanometer-resolution, large-scale electron tomography reconstructions and dynamic, optical-resolution, polarized…
Symmetries essentially provide conservation rules in nonlinear light-matter interactions, that facilitate control and understanding of photon conversion processes or electron dynamics. Since anisotropic solids have rich symmetries, they are…
Organic molecular crystals are appealing for next-generation optoelectronic applications, most notably due to their multiexciton generation process that can increase the efficiency of photovoltaic devices. However, a general understanding…
Malleability of metals is an example of how dynamics of defects like dislocations induced by external stresses alters material properties and enables technological applications. However, these defects move merely to comply with the…
The aim of this work is to prove that it is possible to realise an optical system which produces as output a light intensity that can be expressed in the same mathematical form of the spin glass Hamiltonian. The optical system under study…
Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…
The creation of synthetic systems that emulate the defining properties of living matter, such as motility, gradient-sensing, signalling and replication, is a grand challenge of biomimetics. Such imitations of life crucially contain active…
In both biological and artificial systems, concentration gradients can serve as a convenient mechanism for manipulating particles and generating motility. Particles that interact with a solute will move along its gradient; if they…
A microscopic field theory for crystallization in active systems is proposed which unifies the phase-field-crystal model of freezing with the Toner-Tu theory for self-propelled particles. A wealth of different active crystalline states are…
Recent advances in the field of active soft matter promise a lot. Both, experimental advances and theoretical understanding point towards new material classes in reach, for example self-healing materials that might switch their properties…
Time crystals are classified as discrete or continuous depending on whether they spontaneously break discrete or continuous time translation symmetry. While discrete time crystals have been extensively studied in periodically driven systems…
Microscopic active droplets are able to swim autonomously in viscous flows: this puzzling feature stems from solute exchanges with the surrounding fluid via surface reactions or their spontaneous solubilisation, and the interfacial flows…
Starting from a microscopic model, we investigate the optical spectra of molecules in strongly-coupled organic microcavities examining how they might self-consistently adapt their coupling to light. We consider both rotational and…
Active matter systems comprise self-propelled particles that move on a substrate while leaving chemical trails that influence other particles through chemotaxis (e.g., slime-depositing bacteria). Orientational chemotaxis manifests as a…
Nonreciprocal nonequilibrium process are attracting growing interest in sociology, animal behaviour, chemistry, and nanotechnology, and may have played a role in the origin of life. It is less widely recognized, however, that in open…
Self-organization phenomena in ensembles of self-propelled particles open pathways to the synthesis of new dynamic states not accessible by traditional equilibrium processes. The challenge is to develop a set of principles that facilitate…
We show that the oscillatory driving of crystal surfaces can induce pattern formation or smoothening. The driving force can be of quite different origin such as a pulsed laser beam, an electric field, or elasticity. Depending on driving…
Artificial soft matter systems have appeared as important tools to harness mechanical motion for microscale manipulation. Typically, this motion is driven either by the external fields or by mutual interaction between the colloids. In the…
Collective oscillation of cells in a population has been reported under diverse biological contexts and with vastly different molecular constructs. Could there be common principles similar to those that govern spontaneous oscillation in…
Life in complex systems, such as cities and organisms, comes to a standstill when global coordination of mass, energy, and information flows is disrupted. Global coordination is no less important in single cells, especially in large oocytes…