Related papers: Active phase separation: new phenomenology from no…
The sustenance of life depends on the high degree of organization that prevails through different levels of living organisms, from subcellular structures such as biomolecular complexes and organelles to tissues and organs. The physical…
Active phase separations evade canonical thermodynamic descriptions and have thus challenged our understanding of coexistence and interfacial phenomena. Considerable progress has been made towards a non-equilibrium theoretical description…
Motivated by recent experiments on colloidal suspensions, we study analytically and numerically a microscopic model for self-propelled particles lacking alignment interactions. In this model, even for purely repulsive interactions, a…
Biomolecular condensates in cells are often rich in catalytically-active enzymes. This is particularly true in the case of the large enzymatic complexes known as metabolons, which contain different enzymes that participate in the same…
Phase separation driven by nonequilibrium fluctuations is a hallmark of both living and synthetic active matter. Unlike equilibrium systems, where ordered states arise from the minimization of free energy, active systems are fueled by a…
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…
The formation of polarized signaling domains on cell membranes is a fundamental example of biological pattern formation. While such patterns resemble structures from equilibrium phase separation, they are intrinsically non-equilibrium,…
Phase-separating active systems can display phenomenology that is impossible in equilibrium. The binodal densities are not solely determined by a bulk (effective) free energy, but also affected by gradient terms, while capillary waves and…
Studies of active matter, from molecular assemblies to animal groups, have revealed two broad classes of behavior: a tendency to align yields orientational order and collective motion, whereas particle repulsion leads to self-trapping and…
Proteins and nucleic acids can spontaneously self-assemble into membraneless droplet-like compartments, both in vitro and in vivo. A key component of these droplets are multi-valent proteins that possess several adhesive domains with…
The separation of substances into different phases is ubiquitous in nature and important scientifically and technologically. This phenomenon may become drastically different if the species involved, whether molecules or supramolecular…
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…
Phase separation, crucial for spatially segregating biomolecules in cells, is well-understood in the simple case of a few components with pairwise interactions. Yet, biological cells challenge the simple picture in at least two ways: First,…
Phase separation has recently emerged as an important organizational principle in the dense and heterogeneous environment within living cells. Here, we use a synthetic system to show that compressive stresses in a polymer network suppress…
Many active biological particles, such as swimming microorganisms or motor-proteins, do work on their environment by going though a periodic sequence of shapes. Interactions between particles can lead to the phase-synchronization of their…
We study phase separation between coexisting active and passive fluids in three-dimensions, using numerical simulation and experiments. Chaotic flows of the active phase drive giant interfacial deformations, causing the co-existing phases…
Phase separation can drive spatial organization of multicomponent mixtures. For instance in developing animal embryos, effective phase separation descriptions have been used to account for the spatial organization of different tissue types.…
Phase separation dynamics with an initially non-uniform concentration are studied. Critical and off-critical behavior is observed simultaneously. A mechanism for an expanding phase separated region is demonstrated and the time dependence of…
We study numerically and analytically a model of self-propelled polar disks on a substrate in two dimensions. The particles interact via isotropic repulsive forces and are subject to rotational noise, but there is no aligning interaction.…
Self-propelled particles include both self-phoretic synthetic colloids and various micro-organisms. By continually consuming energy, they bypass the laws of equilibrium thermodynamics. These laws enforce the Boltzmann distribution in…