Related papers: Elasticity tunes mechanical stress localization ar…

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…

Topological defects are increasingly being identified in various biological systems, where their characteristic flow fields and stress patterns are associated with continuous active stress generation by biological entities. Here, using…

Active materials are those in which individual, uncoordinated local stresses drive the material out of equilibrium on a global scale. Examples of such assemblies can be seen across scales from schools of fish to the cellular cytoskeleton…

We analyse the effect of anisotropy in elastic constants on the hydrodynamics of active nematics. Building on the multipole framework for a single elastic constant, we determine the leading effect of elastic anisotropy on the active…

Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…

Active matter is characterized by its ability to induce motion by self-generated stress. In the case of a solid, such motion can lead to shape transformations. The stress-generating components can be anisotropic endowing the material with…

In amorphous materials, plasticity is localized and occurs as shear transformations. It was recently shown by Wu et al. that these shear transformations can be predicted by applying topological defect concepts developed for liquid crystals…

The response to a localized force provides a sensitive test for different models of stress transmission in granular solids. The elasto-plastic models traditionally used by engineers have been challenged by theoretical and experimental…

In this paper, we introduce a methodology applicable to a wide range of localized two-dimensional sources of stress. This methodology is based on a geometric formulation of elasticity. Localized sources of stress are viewed as singular…

Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…

Recent advances in topological mechanics have revealed unusual phenomena such as topologically protected floppy modes and states of self-stress that are exponentially localized at boundaries and interfaces of mechanical networks. In this…

Biological growth is often driven by mechanical cues, such as changes in external pressure or tensile loading. Moreover, it is well known that many living tissues actively maintain a preferred level of mechanical internal stress, called the…

Stress propagation in nonlinear media is crucial in cell biology, where molecular motors exert anisotropic force dipoles on the fibrous cytoskeleton. While the force dipoles can be either contractile or expansile, a medium made of fibers…

Tension in lipid membranes is often controlled externally, by pulling on the boundary of the membrane or changing osmotic pressure across a curved membrane. But modifications of the tension can also be induced in an internal fashion, for…

A mesoscopic model for shear plasticity of amorphous materials in two dimensions is introduced, and studied through numerical simulations in order to elucidate the macroscopic (large scale) mechanical behavior. Plastic deformation is…

The topological properties of many materials are central to their behavior, with the dynamics of topological defects being particularly important to intrinsically out-of-equilibrium, active materials. In this paper, local manipulation of…

We investigate the effect of an anisotropic substrate on the turbulent dynamics of a simulated two dimensional active nematic. This is introduced as an anisotropic friction and an effective anisotropic viscosity, with the orientation of the…

Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…

A new approach for generating stress-constrained topological designs in continua is presented. The main novelty is in the use of elasto-plastic modeling and in optimizing the design such that it will exhibit a linear-elastic response. This…

Recent experiments in various cell types have shown that two-dimensional tissues often display local nematic order, with evidence of extensile stresses manifest in the dynamics of topological defects. Using a mesoscopic model where tissue…