Related papers: Active Solids: Topological Defect Self-Propulsion …
We present a generic framework for modelling three-dimensional deformable shells of active matter that captures the orientational dynamics of the active particles and hydrodynamic interactions on the shell and with the surrounding…
Topological defects in nematically aligned cell populations play a critical role in modulating collective motion, from microbial colonies to epithelial tissues. Despite the potential of manipulating such topological defects to control…
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…
Active nematics contain topological defects which under sufficient activity move, create and annihilate in a chaotic quasi-steady state, called active turbulence. However, understanding active defects under confinement is an open challenge,…
In many active systems, swimmers collectively stir the surrounding fluid to stabilize some self-sustained vortices. The resulting nonequilibrium state is often referred to as active turbulence, by analogy with the turbulence of passive…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
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…
Liquid crystals inevitably possess topological defect excitations generated through boundary conditions, applied fields or in quenches to the ordered phase. In equilibrium pairs of defects coarsen and annihilate as the uniform ground state…
Recent numerical simulations of lid-driven cavity flow of a nematic liquid crystal have found dynamical behavior where topological defects rotate about the center of the fluid vortex induced by the lid motion. By considering a simpler…
The persistent dynamics in systems out of equilibrium, particularly those characterized by annihilation and creation of topological defects, is known to involve complicated spatiotemporal processes and is deemed difficult to control. Here…
Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…
This paper is devoted to the existence of a weak solution to a system describing a self-propelled motion of a rigid body in a viscous fluid in the whole $\mathbb{R}^3$. The fluid is modelled by the incompressible nonhomogeneous…
A constitutive relation between stress and strain relative to a reference state is the basic assumption of elasticity theory. However, in living matter, force generation is governed by motor molecule activity, which does not depend on…
Biological tissues exhibit diverse mechanical and rheological behaviors during morphogenesis. While much is known about tissue phase transitions controlled by structural order and cell mechanics, key questions regarding how tissue-scale…
Collective guidance of out-of-equilibrium systems without using external fields is a challenge of paramount importance in active matter, ranging from bacterial colonies to swarms of self-propelled particles. Designing strategies to guide…
We provide a minimal model for an active nematic film in contact with both a solid substrate and a passive isotropic fluid, and explore its dynamics in one and two dimensions using a combination of hybrid Lattice Boltzmann simulations and…
Drops of active liquid crystal have recently shown the ability to self-propel, which was associated with topological defects in the orientation of active filaments [Sanchez {\em et al.}, Nature {\bf 491}, 431 (2013)]. Here, we study the…
Active droplets can swim spontaneously in viscous flows as a result of the non-linear convective transport of a chemical solute produced at their surface by the Marangoni and/or phoretic flows generated by this solute's inhomogeneous…
Cell monolayers are a central model system to tissue biophysics. In vivo, epithelial tissues are curved on the scale of microns, and curvature's role in the onset of spontaneous tissue flows is still not well-understood. Here, we present a…
Coherent flows of self-propelled particles are characterized by vortices and jets that sustain chaotic flows, referred to as active turbulence. Here, we reveal a crossover between defect-free active turbulence and active turbulence laden…