Related papers: Non-equilibrium structure and relaxation in active…
Recent experimental realizations of liquid-liquid phase separation of active liquid crystals have offered an insight into the interaction between phase separation, ubiquitous in soft matter and biology, and chaotic active flows. In this…
We present a generic mechanism by which reproducing microorganisms, with a diffusivity that depends on the local population density, can form stable patterns. It is known that a decrease of swimming speed with density can promote separation…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is important across biology, physics, and materials science. Although usually studied at equilibrium, active components - such as motor proteins, enzymes, and synthetic microswimmers - are increasingly…
Liquid-liquid phase separation is now recognized as a common mechanism for regulating enzyme activity in cells. Insights from studies in cells are complemented by in vitro studies aimed at developing better understanding of mechanisms…
We consider microscopic models of active particles whose velocities, rotational diffusivities, and tumbling rates depend on the gradient of a local field, which is either externally imposed or depends on all particle positions. Despite the…
Demixing of binary liquids is a ubiquitous transition, which is explained using a well-established thermodynamic formalism that requires equality of intensive thermodynamics parameters across the phase boundaries. Demixing transitions also…
Partitioning of (bio)materials in polymeric mixtures is a key phenomenon both in cellular environments, as well as in industrial applications. In cells, several macromolecules are suspended within different biomolecular phases. On the other…
Fluid-structure interactions between active and passive components are important for many biological systems to function. A particular example is chromatin in the cell nucleus, where ATP-powered processes drive coherent motions of the…
In thermodynamic equilibrium, the fluctuation-dissipation theorem links thermal fluctuations and dissipation. Biological systems, however, are driven out of equilibrium by internal processes that produce additional, active fluctuations.…
We consider a mixture of passive (i.e., Brownian) and active (e.g., bacterial or colloidal swimmers) particles, and analyze the stability conditions of either uniformly mixed or phase segregated steady states consisting of phases enriched…
Periodic microphases universally emerge in systems for which short-range inter-particle attraction is frustrated by long-range repulsion. The morphological richness of these phases makes them desirable material targets, but our relatively…
Chemically active droplets provide simple models for cell-like systems that can grow and divide. Such active droplet systems are driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium and turn over chemically, which corresponds to a simple metabolism.…
We report numerical results for the hydrodynamics of inhomogeneous lyotropic and extensile active nematic gels. By simulating the coupled Cahn-Hilliard, Navier-Stokes, and Beris-Edwards equation for the evolution of the composition, flow…
Non-equilibrium phase separating systems with reactions can break time-reversal symmetry (TRS) in two distinct ways. Firstly, the conservative and non-conservative sectors of the dynamics can be governed by incompatible free energies; when…
DNA is now firmly established as a versatile and robust platform for achieving synthetic nanostructures. While the folding of single molecules into complex structures is routinely achieved through engineering basepair sequences, much less…
We present a systematic theory of chemically active emulsions in the hydrodynamic limit by constructing a thermodynamically consistent framework in which the equilibrium is broken by chemo-stating of fuel molecules. For ternary solutions…
Mixtures of several macromolecular species can lead to the formation of higher-order structures that often display non-ideal mixing behavior. In this work, we propose a minimal model of a quaternary system which considers the formation of a…
Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed balance is crucial to achieve biological functions such as…
Test experiments of hybridization in DNA microarrays show systematic deviations from the equilibrium isotherms. We argue that these deviations are due to the presence of a partially hybridized long-lived state, which we include in a kinetic…
Differences in activities in colloidal particles are sufficient to drive phase separation between active and passive (or less active) particles, even if they have only excluded volume interactions. In this paper, we study the phase…