Related papers: Achieving designed texture and flows in bulk activ…
Motivated by fatigue damage models, this paper addresses optimal control problems governed by a non-smooth system featuring two non-differentiable mappings. This consists of a coupling between a doubly non-smooth history-dependent evolution…
Dynamics of small particles, both living such as swimming bacteria and inanimate, such as colloidal spheres, has fascinated scientists for centuries. If one could learn how to control and streamline their chaotic motion, that would open…
An optimal control strategy is developed to construct nanostructures of desired geometry along line segments by means of directed self-assembly of charged particles. Such a control strategy determines the electric potentials of a set of…
This paper gives a summary of a body of work at the intersection of control theory and smooth nonlinear dynamics. The main idea is to transfer the concept of uniform hyperbolicity, central to the theory of smooth dynamical systems, to…
Biological systems achieve precise control over ambient fluids through the self-organization of active protein structures including flagella, cilia, and cytoskeletal networks. In active structures individual proteins consume chemical energy…
In ergodic singular stochastic control problems, a decision-maker can instantaneously adjust the evolution of a state variable using a control of bounded variation, with the goal of minimizing a long-term average cost functional. The cost…
Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…
In conventional quantum optimal control theory, the parameters that determine an external field are optimised to maximise some predefined function of the trajectory, or of the final state, of a matter system. The situation changes in the…
In this paper, we describe a constrained Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalism for the optimal control of nonholonomic mechanical systems. In particular, we aim to minimize a cost functional, given initial and final conditions where the…
We consider a phenomenological continuum theory for an extensile, overdamped active nematic liquid crystal, applicable in the dense regime. Constructed from general principles, the theory is universal, with parameters independent of any…
For systems in an externally controllable time-dependent potential, the optimal protocol minimizes the mean work spent in a finite-time transition between two given equilibrium states. For overdamped dynamics which ignores inertia effects,…
Quantifying energy flows at nanometer scales promises to guide future research in a variety of disciplines, from microscopic control and manipulation, to autonomously operating molecular machines. A general understanding of the…
Optimal control theory deals with finding protocols to steer a system between assigned initial and final states, such that a trajectory-dependent cost function is minimized. The application of optimal control to stochastic systems is an…
In the present paper we deal with an optimal control problem related to a model in population dynamics; more precisely, the goal is to modify the behavior of a given density of individuals via another population of agents interacting with…
Microfluidics involves the manipulation of flows at the microscale, typically requiring external power sources to generate pressure gradients. Alternatively, harnessing flows from active fluids, which are usually chaotic, has been proposed…
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,…
This paper studies (single-time and multitime) optimal control problems on a nonholonomic manifold (described either by the kernel of a Gibbs-Pfaff form or by the span of appropriate vector fields). For both descriptions we analyse:…
Coupling between flows and material properties imbues rheological matter with its wide-ranging applicability, hence the excitement for harnessing the rheology of active fluids for which internal structure and continuous energy injection…
We consider the problem of a dynamical network whose dynamics is subject to external perturbations (`attacks') locally applied at a subset of the network nodes. We assume that the network has an ability to defend itself against attacks with…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…