Related papers: Modeling flying formations as flow-mediated matter
In recent years the functionality of synthetic active microparticles has edged even closer to that of their biological counterparts. However, we still lack the understanding needed to recreate at the microscale key features of autonomous…
Flutter instability in an infinite medium is a form of material instability corresponding to the occurrence of complex conjugate squares of the acceleration wave velocities. Although its occurrence is known to be possible in elastoplastic…
Hydrodynamic interactions between swimming or flying organisms can lead to complex flows on the scale of the group. These emergent fluid dynamics are often more complex than a linear superposition of individual organism flows, especially at…
Biological tissues have been observed to display emergent fluid-like properties, owing to physical interactions between cells. However, it remains unclear in general how these fluid-like properties affect tissue structure and function.…
Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) are subjected to platform motion induced by wind and wave loads. The oscillatory movement trigger vortex instabilities, modifying the wake structure, influencing the flow reaching downstream wind…
Flow networks are fundamental for understanding systems such as animal and plant vasculature or power distribution grids. These networks can encode, transmit, and transform information embodied in the spatial and temporal distribution of…
One of the hallmarks of active matter is its rich nonlinear dynamics and instabilities. Recent numerical simulations of phototactic algae showed that a thin jet of swimmers, obtained from hydrodynamic focusing inside a Poiseuille flow, was…
Turbulence grounds aircraft and combating it in flight requires energy, yet volant wildlife fly effortlessly even on windy days. The nature of the interactions between soaring birds and transient turbulent gusts is not clear, especially…
The breakup of a fluid jet into droplets has long fascinated natural scientists, with early research dating back to the 19th century. Infinitesimal perturbations to a jet grow because of surface tension, which eventually leads to breakup of…
Active matter drives its constituent agents to move autonomously by harnessing free energy, leading to diverse emergent states with relevance to both biological processes and inanimate functionalities. Achieving maximum reconfigurability of…
Patterns of vortex ripples form when a sand bed is subjected to an oscillatory fluid flow. Here we describe experiments on the response of regular vortex ripple patterns to sudden changes of the driving amplitude a or frequency f. A…
One of the most impressive features of moving animal groups is their ability to perform sudden coherent changes in travel direction. While this collective decision can be a response to an external perturbation, such as the presence of a…
We have recorded the swarming-like collective migration of a large number of keratocytes (tissue cells obtained from the scales of goldfish) using long-term videomicroscopy. By increasing the overall density of the migrating cells, we have…
Many living and artificial systems show a similar emergent behavior and collective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of mammals and crowds of people. What all these systems…
A great number of biological organisms live in aqueous environments. Major evolutionary transitions, including the emergence of life itself, likely occurred in such environments. While the chemical aspects of the role of water in biology…
The acoustic levitation of small particles provides a versatile platform to investigate the collective dynamical properties of self-assembled many-body systems in the presence of hydrodynamic coupling. However, acoustic scattering forces…
When tiny soft ferromagnetic particles are placed along a liquid interface and exposed to a vertical magnetic field, the balance between capillary attraction and magnetic repulsion leads to self-organization into well-defined patterns.…
Active particles under soft confinement such as droplets or vesicles present intriguing phenomena, as collective motion emerges alongside the deformation of the environment. A model is employed to systematically investigate droplet…
In swarms of flying insects, the motions of individuals are largely uncoordinated with those of their neighbors, unlike the highly ordered motion of bird flocks. However, it has been observed that insects may transiently form pairs with…
Collective motion is often modeled within the framework of active fluids, where the constituent active particles, when interactions with other particles are switched off, perform normal diffusion at long times. However, in biology,…