Related papers: Boundary geometry controls a topological defect tr…

Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…

Level set-based immersed boundary techniques operate on nonconforming meshes while providing a crisp definition of interface and external boundaries. In such techniques, an isocontour of a level set field interpolated from nodal level set…

Morphogenesis emerges from dynamic feedback among geometry, mechanics, and chemistry; however, disentangling these contributions in living systems remains challenging. Here, we focus on the interplay between geometry and mechanics by…

We characterise the particlelike kinematics of charge-carrying topological defects in nematic media via a geometric field theory. This differs from the theory of electromagnetism, with which it is often compared, due to the absence of…

The mechanics of epithelial tissues, which is governed by forces generated in various cell domains, is often investigated using two-dimensional models that account for the apically-positioned actomyosin structures but neglect basolateral…

The actomyosin cortex, a thin layer of a cross-linked polymer network near the cell surface, generates active forces that are responsible for cell shape changes. Many developmental processes that involve such cell shape changes, most…

Many systems in nature and the synthetic world involve ordered arrangements of units on two-dimensional surfaces. We review here the fundamental role payed by both the topology of the underlying surface and its detailed curvature. Topology…

We consider membranes as fluid deformable surface and allow for higher order geometric terms in the bending energy. The evolution equations are derived and numerically solved using surface finite elements. The higher order geometric terms…

Topology is a powerful tool for categorizing magnetization textures by defining a topological index in both two-dimensional (2D) systems, such as thin films or curved surfaces, and in 3D bulk systems. In the emerging field of 3D…

Foundation models for 3D shape generation have recently shown a remarkable capacity to encode rich geometric priors across both global and local dimensions. However, leveraging these priors for downstream tasks can be challenging as…

Geometric confinement and topological constraints present promising means of controlling active materials. By combining analytical arguments derived from the Born-Oppenheimer approximation with numerical simulations, we investigate the…

We consider the topological abelian BF theory with radial boundary on a generic 3D manifold. Our aim is to study if, where and how the boundary keeps memory of the details of the background metric. We find that some features are…

Systems of active particles are often affected by confinement due to nearby boundaries. Recently, there has been interest in the effect of confinement by complex three dimensional geometries, as might occur in structured environments such…

Boundary shape, particularly roughness, strongly controls the amount of wall slip in dense granular flows. In this paper, we aim to quantify and understand which aspects of a dense granular flow are controlled by the boundary condition, and…

The underlying structural disorder renders the concept of topological defects in amorphous solids difficult to apply and hinders a first-principle identification of the microscopic carriers of plasticity and of the regions more prone to…

We study topological systems with both a chiral and a spatial symmetry which result in an additional spatial chiral symmetry. We distinguish the topologically nontrivial states according to the chiral symmetries protecting them and study…

Tissue deformations during morphogenesis can be active, driven by internal processes, or passive, resulting from stresses applied at their boundaries. Here, we introduce the Drosophila hindgut primordium as a model for studying…

Monolayers of anisotropic cells exhibit long-ranged orientational order and topological defects. During the development of organisms, orientational order often influences morphogenetic events. However, the linkage between the mechanics of…

The bulk-boundary correspondence, which links a bulk topological property of a material to the existence of robust boundary states, is a hallmark of topological insulators. However, in crystalline topological materials the presence of…

Controlling the motion of active matter is a central issue that has recently garnered significant attention in fields ranging from non-equilibrium physics to chemical engineering and biology. Distinct methods for controlling active matter…