Related papers: Active fluids form system-spanning filamentary net…
Liquid-liquid phase separation of aqueous two-phase system (ATPS) is fundamental across physical and biological sciences. While well understood for passive systems, how this process is regulated by active agents such as motile bacteria…
Using three-dimensional representation of confluent cell layers, we map the amorphous solid to fluid phase transition in active cell layers onto the two-dimensional (2D) site percolation universality class. Importantly, we unify two…
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 this review we summarize theoretical progress in the field of active matter, placing it in the context of recent experiments. Our approach offers a unified framework for the mechanical and statistical properties of living matter:…
Topological defects in active liquid crystals can be confined by introducing gradients of activity. Here, we examine the dynamical behavior of two defects confined by a sharp gradient of activity that separates an active circular region and…
Active fluid droplets surrounded by oil can spontaneously develop circulatory flows. However, the dynamics of the surrounding oil and their influence on the active fluid remain poorly understood. To investigate interactions between the…
I put forward a continuum theory for active nematic gels, defined as fluids or suspensions of orientable rodlike objects endowed with active dynamics, that is based on symmetry arguments and compatibility with thermodynamics. The starting…
Liquid-liquid phase separation has recently emerged as an important topic in the context of cellular organization. Within this context, there are multiple poorly understood features; for instance hints of critical behavior in the plasma…
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…
Various biological and chemical processes lead to the nucleation and growth of non-wetting fluid bubbles within the pore space of a granular medium, such as the formation of gas bubbles in liquid-saturated lake-bed sediments. In…
We present dynamical density functional theory results for the time evolution of the density distribution of a sedimenting model two-dimensional binary mixture of colloids. The interplay between the bulk phase behaviour of the mixture, its…
Perturbations of fluid media can give rise to non-equilibrium dynamics, which may in turn cause motion of immersed inclusions. We consider perturbations ("activations") that are local in space and time, of a fluid density which is…
Motility-induced phase separation (MIPS), the phenomenon in which purely repulsive active particles undergo a liquid-gas phase separation, is among the simplest and most widely studied examples of a nonequilibrium phase transition. Here, we…
Active matter drives its constituent agents to move autonomously by harnessing free energy, leading to diverse emergent states with relevance to both biological processes and inanimate functionalities. Achieving maximum reconfigurability of…
A combination of cellular contractility and active phase separation in cell-matrix composites is thought to be an enabler of spatiotemporal patterning in multicellular tissues across scales, from somitogenesis to cartilage condensation. To…
We develop a general theory for describing phase coexistence between nonequilibrium steady states in Brownian systems, based on power functional theory (M. Schmidt and J.M. Brader, J. Chem. Phys. 138, 214101 (2013)). We apply the framework…
Membrane shape fluctuations induce attractive interactions between rigid inclusions. Previous analytical studies showed that the fluctuation-induced pair interactions are rather small compared to thermal energies, but also that multi-body…
Active liquid crystals or active gels are soft materials which can be physically realised e.g. by preparing a solution of cytoskeletal filaments interacting with molecular motors. We study the hydrodynamics of an active liquid crystal in a…
Active matter embraces systems that self-organize at different length and time scales, often exhibiting turbulent flows. Here, we use a quasi-two-dimensional nematically ordered layer of a protein-based active gel to experimentally…
The past few years have seen many advances in our understanding of the dynamics of polymeric fluids. These include improvements on the successful reptation theory; an emerging molecular theory of semiflexible chain dynamics; and an…