Related papers: Shaping active matter from crystalline solids to a…
The term active matter describes diverse systems, spanning macroscopic (e.g. shoals of fish and flocks of birds) to microscopic scales (e.g. migrating cells, motile bacteria and gels formed through the interaction of nanoscale molecular…
Active constituents burn fuel to sustain individual motion, giving rise to collective effects that are not seen in systems at thermal equilibrium, such as phase separation with purely repulsive interactions. There is a great potential in…
These lecture notes are designed to provide a brief introduction into the phenomenology of active matter and to present some of the analytical tools used to rationalize the emergent behavior of active systems. Such systems are made of…
In equilibrium, the physical properties of matter are set by the interactions between the constituents. In contrast, the energy input of the individual components controls the behavior of synthetic or living active matter. Great progress…
Activity and autonomous motion are fundamental in living and engineering systems. This has stimulated the new field of active matter in recent years, which focuses on the physical aspects of propulsion mechanisms, and on motility-induced…
Active matter embraces systems that self-organize at different length and time scales, often exhibiting turbulent flows. Here, we use a quasi-two-dimensional nematically ordered layer of a protein-based active gel to experimentally…
Controlling interfaces of phase separating fluid mixtures is key to creating diverse functional soft materials. Traditionally, this is accomplished with surface-modifying chemical agents. Using experiment and theory, we study how mechanical…
The field of synthetic active matter has, thus far, been led by efforts to create point-like, isolated (yet interacting) self-propelled objects (\emph{e.g.} colloids, droplets, microrobots) and understanding their collective dynamics. The…
Active matter, composed of self-propelled entities, forms a wide class of out-of-equilibrium systems that display striking collective behaviors among which the so-called active turbulence where spatially and time disordered flow patterns…
Active matter locally converts chemical energy into mechanical work and, for this reason, it provides new mechanisms of pattern formation. In particular, active gels made of protein motors and filaments are far-from-equilibrium systems that…
Active matter systems display a fascinating range of dynamical states, including stationary patterns and turbulent phases. While the former can be tackled with methods from the field of pattern formation, the spatio-temporal disorder of the…
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…
In this book chapter, we review how systems of simple motile agents can be used as a pathway to intelligent systems. It is a well known result from nature that large groups of entities following simple rules, such as swarms of animals, can…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into mechanical work to produce autonomous motion, and exhibit striking collective dynamics that biology relies on for essential functions. Controlling those dynamics and transport in…
In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…
A paradigm for internally driven matter is the active nematic liquid crystal, whereby the equations of a conventional nematic are supplemented by a minimal active stress that violates time reversal symmetry. In practice, active fluids may…
Active solids such as cell collectives, colloidal clusters, and active metamaterials exhibit diverse collective phenomena, ranging from rigid body motion to shape-changing mechanisms. The nonlinear dynamics of such active materials remains…
Active matter comprises self-driven units, such as bacteria and synthetic microswimmers, that can spontaneously form complex patterns and assemble into functional microdevices. These processes are possible thanks to the out-of-equilibrium…
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…
Active matter, comprising many active agents interacting and moving in fluids or more complex environments, is a commonly occurring state of matter in biological and physical systems. By its very nature active matter systems exist in…