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Related papers: Topological defects in polar active matter

200 papers

Morphological trends in growing colonies of living cells are at the core of physiological and evolutionary processes. Using active gel equations, which include cell division, we show that shape changes during the growth can be regulated by…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-07-27 Amin Doostmohammadi , Sumesh P. Thampi , Julia M. Yeomans

Growing experimental evidence indicates that topological defects could serve as organizing centers in the morphogenesis of tissues. Here, we provide a quantitative explanation for this phenomenon, rooted in the buckling theory of deformable…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-04-21 Ludwig A. Hoffmann , Livio Nicola Carenza , Julia Eckert , Luca Giomi

We consider the patterns of collective motion emerging when many aligning, self-propelling units move in two dimensions while interacting through a repulsive potential and are also subject to delays and random perturbations. In this…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-11-14 Fatemeh Pakpour , Tamás Vicsek

This article reviews recent research on the collective dynamical behavior of colloids with dipolar or multipolar interactions. Indeed, whereas equilibrium structures and static self-assembly of such systems are now rather well understood,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-02-02 Sabine H. L. Klapp

Coherent vortical motion has been reported in a wide variety of populations including living organisms (bacteria, fishes, human crowds) and synthetic active matter (shaken grains, mixtures of biopolymers), yet a unified description of the…

Polar patterns and topological defects are ubiquitous in active matter. In this paper, we study a paradigmatic polar active dumbbell system through numerical simulations, to clarify how polar patterns and defects emerge and shape evolution.…

Directing individual motions of many constituents to coherent dynamical state is a fundamental challenge in multiple fields. Here, based on the spherical crystal model, we show that topological defects in particle arrays can be a crucial…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-06-11 Zhenwei Yao

We study the spontaneous motion, binary collisions, and collective dynamics of "polar disks", i.e. purpose-built particles which, when vibrated between two horizontal plates, move coherently along a direction strongly correlated to their…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2016-01-19 Julien Deseigne , Sébastien Léonard , Olivier Dauchot , Hugues Chaté

In biological systems, active agents such as actomyosin and cells move and interact on curved surfaces, exhibiting diverse phenomena. These observations have motivated studies of how curvature shapes their collective behavior. Here, using a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-12-19 Tatsuo Shibata

Recent studies in the collective behavior of active colloids have shown that a global polar order may emerge due to long-ranged chemo-repulsive interactions between them. Here, we report the role of pinning disorder in the flocking…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-03-02 Sagarika Adhikary , Arvin Gopal Subramaniam , Rajesh Singh

Active matter encompasses different nonequilibrium systems in which individual constituents convert energy into non-conservative forces or motion at the microscale. This review provides an elementary introduction to the role of topology in…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-06-28 Suraj Shankar , Anton Souslov , Mark J. Bowick , M. Cristina Marchetti , Vincenzo Vitelli

Recent experimental observations have suggested that topological defects can facilitate the creation of sharp features in developing embryos. Whereas these observations echo established knowledge about the interplay between geometry and…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-07-25 Ludwig A. Hoffmann , Livio Nicola Carenza , Luca Giomi

Chaotic transitions in inertial fluids typically proceed through a direct energy cascade from large to small scales. In contrast, active systems, composed of self propelled units, inject energy at microscopic scales and therefore exhibit an…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-04-14 Partha Sarathi Mondal , Tamas Vicsek , Shradha Mishra

The term active matter describes diverse systems, spanning macroscopic (e.g. shoals of fish and flocks of birds) to microscopic scales (e.g. migrating cells, motile bacteria and gels formed through the interaction of nanoscale molecular…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2010-03-11 Gautam I. Menon

Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-04-01 Jiusi Zhang , Chung Wing Chan , Bo Li , Rui Zhang

Self-alignment describes the property of a polar active unit to align or anti-align its orientation towards its velocity. In contrast to mutual alignment, where the headings of multiple active units tend to directly align to each other --…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-12-15 Paul Baconnier , Olivier Dauchot , Vincent Démery , Gustavo Düring , Silke Henkes , Cristián Huepe , Amir Shee

Topological defects are fundamental to the collective dynamics of non-equilibrium systems and in active matter, mediating spontaneous flows, dynamic self-organization, and emergent pattern formation. Here, we reveal critical states in…

When interacting motile units self-organize into flocks, they realize one of the most robust ordered state found in nature. However, after twenty five years of intense research, the very mechanism controlling the ordering dynamics of both…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-10-04 Amélie Chardac , Ludwig A. Hoffmann , Yoann Poupart , Luca Giomi , Denis Bartolo

We study the spatio-temporal dynamics of a model of polar active fluid in two dimensions. The system exhibits a transition from an isotropic to a polarized state as a function of density. The uniform polarized state is, however, unstable…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2011-12-08 Luca Giomi , M. Cristina Marchetti

The emergence of collective motion, also known as flocking or swarming, in groups of moving individuals who orient themselves using only information from their neighbors is a very general phenomenon that is manifested at multiple spatial…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-04-26 David A. Quint , Ajay Gopinathan