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Related papers: Topological defects in polar active matter

200 papers

Topological defects play a prominent role in the physics of two-dimensional materials. When driven out of equilibrium in active nematics, disclinations can acquire spontaneous self-propulsion and drive self-sustained flows upon…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2019-12-06 Suraj Shankar , M. Cristina Marchetti

Topological and geometrical properties and the associated topological defects find a rapidly growing interest in studying the interplay between mechanics and the collective behavior of cells on the tissue level. We here test if well studied…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-09-06 Dennis Wenzel , Simon Praetorius , Axel Voigt

Active systems on curved geometries are ubiquitous in the living world. In the presence of curvature orientationally ordered polar flocks are forced to be inhomogeneous, often requiring the presence of topological defects even in the steady…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2017-09-14 Suraj Shankar , Mark J. Bowick , M. Cristina Marchetti

A wide range of living and artificial active matter exists in close contact with substrates and under strong confinement, where in addition to dipolar active stresses, quadrupolar active stresses can become important. Here, we numerically…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-04-23 Salik A. Sultan , Mehrana R. Nejad , Amin Doostmohammadi

Cells and microorganisms employ dynamic shape changes to enable steering and avoidance for efficient spatial exploration and collective organization. In contrast, active colloids, their synthetic counterparts, currently lack similar…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-01-03 Stefania Ketzetzi , Lorenzo Caprini , Vivien Willems , Laura Alvarez , Hartmut Löwen , Lucio Isa

Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…

Biological Physics · Physics 2016-04-05 Katherine Copenhagen , Ajay Gopinathan

Active matter often simultaneously exhibits different kinds of orientational order and, in many cases of biological interest, undergoes continuous material renewal. In renewing nematopolar fluids we find stable topological strings,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-01-27 Alberto Dinelli , Ludovic Dumoulin , Karsten Kruse

Population heterogeneity is ubiquitous among active living systems, but little is known about its role in determining their spatial organization and large-scale dynamics. Combining evidence from synthetic active fluids assembled from…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-11-27 Samadarshi Maity , Alexandre Morin

Our study explores the mixture of polar particles in apolar environment. We employ a coarse-grained approach to model the mixture, where polar particles are in minority. The interaction between polar and apolar components is incorporated…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-07-11 Pawan Kumar Mishra , Partha Sarathi Mondal , Pratikshya Jena , Shradha Mishra

Colloidal inclusions in nematic fluids induce topological defects that govern their dynamics. These defects create well-understood rheological behavior in passive nematics, but the interplay between colloid-associated defects and…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-03-26 Timofey Kozhukhov , Benjamin Loewe , Kristian Thijssen , Tyler N. Shendruk

The onset of polar flocking in active matter is discontinuous, akin to gas-liquid phase transitions, except that the steady state exhibits microphase separation into polar clusters. While these features have been observed in theoretical…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-03-31 Lorenz Huber , Timo Krüger , Erwin Frey

Motor proteins drive persistent motion and self-organisation of cytoskeletal filaments. However, state-of-the-art microscopy techniques and continuum modelling approaches focus on large length and time scales. Here, we perform…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-06-03 Gerrit Vliegenthart , Arvind Ravichandran , Marisol Ripoll , Thorsten Auth , Gerhard Gompper

Topological defects, which are singular points in a director field, play a major role in shaping active systems. Here, we experimentally study topological defects and the flow patterns around them, that are formed during the highly rapid…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-03-20 Victor Yashunsky , Daniel J. G. Pearce , Gil Ariel , Avraham Be'er

Active fluids, such as cytoskeletal filaments, bacterial colonies and epithelial cell layers, exhibit distinctive orientational coherence, often characterized by nematic order and topological defects. By contrast, little is known about…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-04-07 Mattia Serra , Linnea Lemma , Luca Giomi , Zvonimir Dogic , L. Mahadevan

In active matter systems, self-propelled particles can self-organize to undergo collective motion, leading to persistent dynamical behavior out of equilibrium. In cells, cytoskeletal filaments and motor proteins self-organize into complex…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-05-19 Jeffrey M. Moore , Tyler N. Thompson , Matthew A. Glaser , Meredith D. Betterton

Here we show that coupling to curvature has profound effects on collective motion in active systems, leading to patterns not observed in flat space. Biological examples of such active motion in curved environments are numerous: curvature…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-03-05 Rastko Sknepnek , Silke Henkes

Active colloids and liquid crystals are capable of locally converting the macroscopically-supplied energy into directional motion and promise a host of new applications, ranging from drug delivery to cargo transport at the mesoscale. Here…

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…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-07-25 Ryo Ienaga , Kazusa Beppu , Yusuke T. Maeda

We show that hydrodynamic theories of polar active matter generically possess inhomogeneous traveling solutions. We introduce a unifying dynamical-system framework to establish the shape of these intrinsically nonlinear patterns, and show…

Active matter systems encompass both natural and artificially created systems consisting of numerous active particles. These particles actively consume energy to propel themselves or exert mechanical forces, leading to intricate behaviors…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-05-12 Mintu Karmakar