Related papers: Synthetic active liquid crystals powered by acoust…
Flagellated microswimmers B. Subtilis dispersed in a nematic phase of a lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal form a living liquid crystal (LLC). The combination of the passive and active components allows us to analyze how the active…
We examine the dynamics of a compressible active nematic liquid crystal on a frictional substrate. When frictional damping dominates over viscous dissipation, we eliminate flow in favor of active stresses to obtain a minimal dynamical model…
We provide a minimal model for an active nematic film in contact with both a solid substrate and a passive isotropic fluid, and explore its dynamics in one and two dimensions using a combination of hybrid Lattice Boltzmann simulations and…
Physically intelligent micro-robotic systems exploit information embedded in micro-robots, their colloidal cargo, and their milieu to interact, assemble and form functional structures. Nonlinear anisotropic fluids like nematic liquid…
Using numerical simulations we examine the static and dynamic properties of the recently proposed vortex liquid crystal state. We confirm the existence of a smectic-A phase in the absence of pinning. Quenched disorder can induce a smectic…
The acoustic levitation of small particles provides a versatile platform to investigate the collective dynamical properties of self-assembled many-body systems in the presence of hydrodynamic coupling. However, acoustic scattering forces…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are a stimuli-responsive material which has been intensively studied for applications including artificial muscles, shape morphing structures, and soft robotics, due to its capability of large, programmable,…
Coupling between flow and orientation is a central issue in understanding the collective dynamics of active biofilaments and cells. Active stresses generated by motor activity destroy (quasi-)long-range orientational order and induce…
We show that confining extensile nematics in 3D channels leads to the emergence of two self-organized flow states with nonzero helicity. The first is a pair of braided anti-parallel streams - this double helix occurs when the activity is…
We study the phase behavior of a nematic liquid crystal confined between a flat substrate with strong anchoring and a patterned substrate whose structure and local anchoring strength we vary. By first evaluating an effective surface free…
Active processes drive and guide biological dynamics across scales -- from subcellular cytoskeletal remodelling, through tissue development in embryogenesis, to population-level bacterial colonies expansion. In each of these, biological…
The common description of the electrical behavior of a nematic liquid crystal as an anisotropic dielectric medium with (weak) ohmic conductivity is extended to an electrodiffusion model with two active ionic species. Under appropriate, but…
We consider a continuum model of active viscoelastic matter, whereby an active nematic liquid-crystal is coupled to a minimal model of polymer dynamics with a viscoelastic relaxation time $\tau_C$. To explore the resulting interplay between…
Equilibrium self-assembly and conventional materials processing techniques fall far short of mimicking dynamic self-actuating processes that are commonplace throughout biology. To bridge the gap between living and synthetic matter, we study…
We numerically model a two-dimensional active nematic confined by a periodic array of fixed obstacles. Even in the passive nematic, the appearance of topological defects is unavoidable due to planar anchoring by the obstacle surfaces. We…
Active nematics are dense systems of rodlike particles that consume energy to drive motion at the level of the individual particles. They exist in natural systems like biological tissues and artificial materials such as suspensions of…
Electrically-controlled dynamics of fluids and particles at microscales is a fascinating area of research with applications ranging from microfluidics and sensing to sorting of biomolecules. The driving mechanisms are electric forces acting…
We calculate the effective forces on hard disks near walls embedded inside active nematic liquid crystals. When the disks are sufficiently close to the wall and the flows are sufficiently slow, we can obtain exact expressions for the…
Liquid crystals inevitably possess topological defect excitations generated through boundary conditions, applied fields or in quenches to the ordered phase. In equilibrium pairs of defects coarsen and annihilate as the uniform ground state…
Active (i.e., self-propelled or swimming) particles moving through an isotropic fluid exhibit conventional diffusive behavior. We report anomalous diffusion of an active particle moving in an anisotropic, nematic background. Whilst the…