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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

The study of active matter has revealed novel non-equilibrium collective behaviors, illustrating their potential as a new materials platform. However, most works treat active matter as unregulated systems with uniform microscopic energy…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-10-08 Martin J Falk , Vahid Alizadehyazdi , Heinrich Jaeger , Arvind Murugan

The physics of behavior seeks simple descriptions of animal behavior. The field has advanced rapidly by using techniques in low dimensional dynamics distilled from computer vision. Yet, we still do not generally understand the rules which…

Biological Physics · Physics 2021-07-08 Matthew S. Bull , Manu Prakash

Monolayers of anisotropic cells exhibit long-ranged orientational order and topological defects. During the development of organisms, orientational order often influences morphogenetic events. However, the linkage between the mechanics of…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-01-20 Carles Blanch-Mercader , Pau Guillamat , Aurélien Roux , Karsten Kruse

Topological defects are at the root of the large-scale organization of liquid crystals. In two-dimensional active nematics, two classes of topological defects of charges $\pm 1/2$ are known to play a major role due to active stresses.…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2022-04-08 Louis Brézin , Thomas Risler , Jean-François Joanny

Standard approaches to controlling dynamical systems involve biologically implausible steps such as backpropagation of errors or intermediate model-based system representations. Recent advances in machine learning have shown that…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-07-11 Carlos Floyd , Aaron R. Dinner , Suriyanarayanan Vaikuntanathan

Crystallography typically studies collections of point particles whose interaction forces are the gradient of a potential. Lifting this assumption generically gives rise in the continuum limit to a form of elasticity with additional moduli…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-12-30 Lara Braverman , Colin Scheibner , Bryan VanSaders , Vincenzo Vitelli

Active nematics are fluids in which the components have nematic symmetry and are driven out of equilibrium due to the microscopic generation of an active stress. When the active stress is high, it drives flows in the nematic and can lead to…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2025-11-10 Daniel J. G. Pearce , Berta Martínez-Prat , Jordi Ignés-Mullol , Francesc Sagués

In pulsating active matter, topological defects are motile despite the absence of any macroscopic flows and microscopic self-propulsion. We reveal that this motility arises from a ratchet effect: the mechanochemical coupling between local…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2026-05-26 Luca Casagrande , Alessandro Manacorda , Etienne Fodor

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.…

The presence and significance of active topological defects is increasingly realised in diverse biological and biomimetic systems. We introduce a continuum model of polar active matter, based on conservation laws and symmetry arguments,…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2021-06-08 Aboutaleb Amiri , Romain Mueller , Amin Doostmohammadi

Learning influence pathways of a network of dynamically related processes from observations is of considerable importance in many disciplines. In this article, influence networks of agents which interact dynamically via linear dependencies…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-09-28 Saurav Talukdar , Deepjyoti Deka , Harish Doddi , Donatello Materassi , Misha Chertkov , Murti V. Salapaka

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

Active emulsions and liquid crystalline shells are intriguing and experimentally realisable types of topological matter. Here we numerically study the morphology and spatiotemporal dynamics of a double emulsion, where one or two passive…

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…

Defect dynamics in a thin active nematic layer is studied by asymptotic matching of solutions in the defect core and the far field. The analysis is facilitated by the correspondence between the 2D nematic and complex scalar field models.…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-06-16 L. M. Pismen

Topological defects play a central role in the formation and organization of various biological systems. Historically, such nonequilibrium defects have been mainly studied in the context of homogeneous active nematics. Phase-separated…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2023-07-13 Timo Krüger , Ivan Maryshev , Erwin Frey

We apply optimal control theory to a model of a polar active fluid (the Toner-Tu model), with the objective of driving the system into particular emergent dynamical behaviors or programming switching between states on demand. We use the…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2024-05-15 Saptorshi Ghosh , Chaitanya Joshi , Aparna Baskaran , Michael F. Hagan

Topological defects are distinctive signatures of liquid crystals. They profoundly affect the viscoelastic behavior of the fluid by constraining the orientational structure in a way that inevitably requires global changes not achievable…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2015-06-19 Luca Giomi , Mark J. Bowick , Prashant Mishra , Rastko Sknepnek , M. Cristina Marchetti

A nematic liquid crystal confined to the surface of a sphere exhibits topological defects of total charge $+2$ due to the topological constraint. In equilibrium, the nematic field forms four $+1/2$ defects, located at the corners of a…

Soft Condensed Matter · Physics 2020-07-22 Yi-Heng Zhang , Markus Deserno , Zhan-Chun Tu