Related papers: Morphological instability at topological defects i…

Chemical design of block copolymers makes it possible to create polymer vesicles with tunable microscopic structure. Here we focus on a model of a vesicle made of smectic liquid-crystalline block copolymers at zero temperature. The vesicle…

Point-like motile topological defects control the universal dynamics of diverse two-dimensional active nematics ranging from shaken granular rods to cellular monolayers. A comparable understanding in higher dimensions has yet to emerge. We…

We investigate the viscoelastic relaxation to equilibrium of a disordered planar epithelium described using the cell vertex model. In its standard form, the model is formulated as coupled evolution equations for the locations of vertices of…

Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…

A nematic liquid crystal confined to the surface of a sphere exhibits topological defects of total charge $+2$ due to the topological constraint. In equilibrium, the nematic field forms four $+1/2$ defects, located at the corners of a…

The equilibrium properties of block copolymer micelles confined in polymer thin films are investigated using self-consistent field theory. The theory is based on a model system consisting of AB diblock copolymers and A homopolymers. Two…

We investigate how thin structures change their shape in response to non-mechanical stimuli that can be interpreted as variations in the structure's natural curvature. Starting from the theory of non-Euclidean plates and shells, we derive…

Thermal fluctuations strongly modify the large length-scale elastic behavior of crosslinked membranes, giving rise to scale-dependent elastic moduli. While thermal effects in flat membranes are well understood, many natural and artificial…

Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…

Rigidity transitions in simple models of confluent cells have been a powerful organizing principle in understanding the dynamics and mechanics of dense biological tissue. In this work we explore the interplay between geometry and rigidity…

Collective cell migration plays a crucial role in many developmental processes that underlie morphogenesis, wound healing, or cancer progression. In such coordinated behaviours, cells are organised in coherent structures and actively…

We derive a continuum mechanical model to capture the morphological changes occurring at the pretumoral stage of epithelial tissues. The proposed model aims to investigate the competition between the bulk elasticity of the epithelium and…

We investigate the stress-driven morphological instability of epitaxially growing multilayer films, which are coherent and dislocation-free. We construct a direct elastic analysis, from which we determine the elastic state of the system…

Classical elasticity is concerned with bodies that can be modeled as smooth manifolds endowed with a reference metric that represents local equilibrium distances between neighboring material elements. The elastic energy associated with a…

Topological defects are ubiquitous on surfaces with orientational order fields. Here, we study equilibrium states generated by the feedback between geometry and nematic order on fluid membranes with an integer topological defect. When the…

The vertex model is widely used to simulate the mechanical properties of confluent epithelia and other multicellular tissues. This inherently discrete framework allows a Cauchy stress to be attributed to each cell, and its symmetric…

Topological invariants have proved useful for analyzing emergent function as they characterize a property of the entire system, and are insensitive to local details, disorder, and noise. They support boundary states, which reduce the system…

Understanding the fundamental mechanisms behind plastic instabilities and shear band formation in amorphous media under applied deformation remains a long-standing challenge. Leveraging on the mathematical concept of topology, we revisit…

The plastic deformation of crystalline materials can be understood by considering their structural defects such as disclinations and dislocations. Although glasses are also solids, their structure resembles closely the one of a liquid and…

Biological cells in living tissues form dynamic patterns with local orientational order and topological defects. Here we demonstrate an approach to produce cell monolayer with the predesigned orientational patterns using human dermal…