Related papers: The 2024 Motile Active Matter Roadmap
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
Controlled activity of active entities interacting with a passive environment can generate emergent system-level phenomena, positioning such systems as promising platforms for potential downstream applications in targeted drug delivery,…
Intelligent behavior in life-like systems often arises from the ability to gather, process, and act on information. While active matter provides a framework for studying life-like dynamics, it typically omits internal information-processing…
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…
Chemical affinities are responsible for driving active matter systems out of equilibrium. At the nano-scale, molecular machines interact with the surrounding environment and are subjected to external forces. The mechano-chemical coupling…
Essentially all biology is active and dynamic. Biological entities autonomously sense, com- pute, and respond using energy-coupled ratchets that can produce force and do work. The cytoskeleton, along with its associated proteins and motors,…
Living things avoid equilibrium using molecular machines. Such microscopic soft-matter objects encounter relatively large friction and fluctuations. We discuss design principles for effective molecular machine operation in this unfamiliar…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Studying systems where many individual bodies in motion interact with one another is a complex and interesting area. Simple mechanisms that may be determined for biological, chemical, or physical reasons can lead to astonishingly complex…
Molecular self-organization driven by concerted many-body interactions produces the ordered structures that define both inanimate and living matter. Understanding the physical mechanisms that govern the formation of molecular complexes and…
Active systems across scales, ranging from molecular machines to human crowds, are usually modeled as assemblies of self-propelled particles driven by internally generated forces. However, these models often assume memoryless dynamics and…
Active solids consist of elastically coupled out-of-equilibrium units performing work. They are central to autonomous processes, such as locomotion, self-oscillations and rectification, in biological systems,designer materials and robotics.…
In living systems, we often see the emergence of the ingredients necessary for computation -- the capacity for information transmission, storage, and modification -- begging the question of how we may exploit or imitate such biological…
The growth of world population, limitation of resources, economic problems and environmental issues force engineers to develop increasingly efficient solutions for logistic systems. Pure optimization for efficiency, however, has often led…
Machines enabled the Industrial Revolution and are central to modern technological progress: A machine's parts transmit forces, motion, and energy to one another in a predetermined manner. Today's engineering frontier, building artificial…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…
Active colloidal particles provide versatile model systems for exploring non-equilibrium physics in motile matter. To date, most experimental realizations have focused on spherical particles, largely due to fabrication constraints. However,…
The understanding of the nanoscale physical properties of biomolecules and biomaterials will ultimately promote the research in the biological sciences. In this review, we focused on theory, simulation, and experiments involving nanoscale…
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…
By dynamic planning, we refer to the ability of the human brain to infer and impose motor trajectories related to cognitive decisions. A recent paradigm, active inference, brings fundamental insights into the adaptation of biological…