Related papers: Synthetic active liquid crystals powered by acoust…
Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. Whether collective crystallization phenomena can occur in groups…
We investigate similarities in the micro-structural dynamics between externally driven and actively driven nematics. Walls, lines of strong deformations in the director field, and topological defects are characteristic features of an active…
The interplay between active matter and its environment is central to understanding emergent behavior in biological and synthetic systems. Here, we show that coupling active nematic flows to small-amplitude deformations of a compliant…
Thermotropic liquid crystals are versatile optical materials that exhibit a state of matter intermediate between liquids and solids. Their properties can change significantly with temperature, pressure, or other external factors, leading to…
Motile microorganisms, like bacteria and algae, unify abilities like self-propulsion, autonomous navigation, and decision-making on the micron scale. While recent breakthroughs have led to the creation of synthetic microswimmers and…
Coarse-grained, mesoscale simulations are invaluable for studying soft condensed matter because of their ability to model systems in which a background solvent plays a significant role but is not the primary interest. Such methods generally…
Phononic crystals and acoustic meta-materials are used to tailor phonon and sound propagation properties by facilitating artificial, periodic structures. Analogous to photonic crystals, phononic band gaps can be created, which influence…
Active matter is naturally out of equilibrium which results in the emergence of diverse dynamic steady states, including the omnipresent chaotic state known as the active turbulence. However, much less is known how active systems…
We report curling self-propulsion in aqueous emulsions of common mesogenic compounds. Nematic liquid crystal droplets self-propel in a surfactant solution with concentrations above the critical micelle concentration while undergoing…
Electronically-driven nematic order breaks the rotational symmetry of a system, e.g., through a Pomeranchuk instability of the Fermi surface, with a concomitant distortion of the lattice. As a result, in a metal, the nematic collective mode…
We consider a realistic model, i.e., ultracold atoms in a driven optical lattice, to realize phase space crystals [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 205303 (2013)]. The corresponding lattice structure in phase space is more complex and contains rich…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…
Chiral active matter is predicted to exhibit odd elasticity, with nontraditional elastic response arising from a combination of chirality, being out of equilibrium, and the presence of nonreciprocal interactions. One of the resulting…
Models of active nematics in biological systems normally require complexity arising from the hydrodynamics involved at the microscopic level as well as the viscoelastic nature of the system. Here we show that a minimal, space-independent,…
We investigate the connection between the transport properties and the thermodynamics of electronic systems with a tendency to form broken-symmetry mesophases evocative of the physics of liquid crystals. Through a hydrodynamic approach to…
We show that "dry" active nematics, e.g. collections of shaken elongated granular particles, exhibit large-scale spatiotemporal chaos made of interacting dense, ordered, band-like structures in a parameter region including the linear onset…
Active matter locally converts chemical energy into mechanical work and, for this reason, it provides new mechanisms of pattern formation. In particular, active gels made of protein motors and filaments are far-from-equilibrium systems that…
When a nematic liquid crystal is confined in a porous medium with strong anchoring conditions, topological defects, called disclinations, are stably formed with numerous possible configurations. Since the energy barriers between them are…
Lyotropic liquid crystals can display rich phase behaviour and self-organisation, yet the physical principles underlying their self-assembly into large scale patterns remains understudied. Here, we combine theory, simulations and…
In this paper we investigate the dynamics of liquid crystal textures in a two-dimensional nematic under applied electric fields, using numerical simulations performed using a publicly available LIquid CRystal Algorithm (LICRA) developed by…