Related papers: Active adaptolates: motility-induced percolating s…
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…
The encapsulation of active particles, such as bacteria or active colloids, inside a droplet gives rise to nontrivial shape dynamics and droplet motility. To understand this behavior, we derive an asymptotic solution for the fluid flow…
Dispersed colloidal particles within a suspension can aggregate and spontaneously self-organize into a robust, percolating structure known as a gel. These network-like structures are prevalent in nature and play a critical role in many…
Energy absorbing materials, like foams used in protective equipment, are able to undergo large deformations under low stresses, reducing the incoming stress wave below an injury or damage threshold. They are typically effective in absorbing…
External fields can decidedly alter the free energy landscape of soft materials and can be exploited as a powerful tool for the assembly of targeted nanostructures and colloidal materials. Here, we use computer simulations to demonstrate…
Active droplets are artificial microswimmers built from a liquid dispersion by microfluidic tools and showing self-propelled motion. These systems hold particular interest for mimicking biological phenomena, such as some aspects of cell…
Cells and microorganisms employ dynamic shape changes to enable steering and avoidance for efficient spatial exploration and collective organization. In contrast, active colloids, their synthetic counterparts, currently lack similar…
The morphology of a mixture made of a polar active gel immersed in an isotropic passive fluid is studied numerically. Lattice Boltzmann method is adopted to solve the Navier-Stokes equation and coupled to a finite-difference scheme used to…
Optothermal interaction of active colloidal matter can facilitate environmental cues which can influence the dynamics of active soft matter systems. The optically induced thermal effect can be harnessed to study non-equilibrium…
We develop a model of amoeboid cell motility based on active gel theory. Modeling the motile apparatus of a eukaryotic cell as a confined layer of finite length of poroelastic active gel permeated by a solvent, we first show that, due to…
Micropolar active matter requires for its kinematic description both positional and orientational degrees of freedom. Activity generates dynamic coupling between these kinematic variables that are absent in micropolar passive matter, such…
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…
A density functional theory of two-dimensional freezing is presented for a soft interaction potential that scales as inverse cube of particle distance. This repulsive potential between parallel, induced dipoles is realized for paramagnetic…
Liquid migration in active soft solids is a very common phenomenon in Nature at different scales: from cells to leaves. It can be caused by mechanical as well as chemical actions. The work focuses on the migration of liquid provoked by…
Cells and tissues exert forces and can actively change shape. This strikingly autonomous behavior is powered by the cytoskeleton, which includes an active gel of actin filaments, crosslinks, and myosin molecular motors. Although individual…
This work investigates the effects of tangent polar activity on the conformational and dynamic properties of entangled polymer melts through Langevin molecular dynamics simulations. We examine systems composed of all self-propelled,…
We examine a two-dimensional system of sterically repulsive interacting disks where each particle runs in a random direction. This system is equivalent to a run-and-tumble dynamics system in the limit where the run time is infinite. At low…
Many biological systems consist of self-motile and passive agents both of which contribute to overall functionality. However, there are very few studies of the properties of such mixtures. Here we formulate a model for mixtures of…
Interactions between active individuals in animal collectives lead to emergent responses that remain elusive in synthetic soft matter. Here, shape-morphing polymers are used to create bio-inspired transient solids that self-assemble with…
The addition of enough non-adsorbing polymer to an otherwise stable colloidal suspension gives rise to a variety of phase behavior and kinetic arrest due to the depletion attraction induced between the colloids by the polymers. We report a…