Related papers: Exotic rheology of materials with active rearrange…
In this work we study the rheological features of yield stress materials that exhibit non-homogeneous steady flows and that are subjected to an additional mechanical noise. Using a mesoscale elasto-plastic model accounting for a viscosity…
Mechanical signaling plays a key role in biological processes like embryo development and cancer growth. One prominent way to probe mechanical properties of tissues is to study their response to externally applied forces. Using a…
During embryonic morphogenesis, tissues undergo dramatic deformations in order to form functional organs. Similarly, in adult animals, living cells and tissues are continually subjected to forces and deformations. Therefore, the success of…
Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…
The rheology of biological tissue is key to processes such as embryo development, wound healing and cancer metastasis. Vertex models of confluent tissue monolayers have uncovered a spontaneous liquid-solid transition tuned by cell shape;…
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…
In this work we discuss possible physical origins for non-trivial exponents in the athermal rheology of soft materials at low but finite driving rates. A key ingredient in our scenario is the presence of a self-consistent mechanical noise…
This study examines the flow of dense granular materials under external shear stress and pressure using discrete element method simulations. In this method, the material is allowed to strain along all periodic directions and adapt its solid…
Morphogenesis involves complex shape changes of biological tissues. Yet, tissue shape changes depend on tissue rheology, which in turn arises from the interplay of large numbers of cells. Here, we link cell- and tissue-scale mechanics by…
Recoverable strain is the strain recovered once a stress is removed from a body, in the direction opposite to that in which the stress had acted. To date, the phenomenon has been understood as being elastic in origin: polymer chains…
Most materials age, and their properties change over time. The aging of materials is reflected in their mechanical responses to external stress and strain, which exhibit logarithmic relaxation and universal power-law creep. Those responses…
Quantifying the in-plane rheology of epithelial monolayers remains challenging due to the difficulty of imposing controlled shear. We introduce a self-driven, rheometer-like assay in which collective migration generates stationary shear…
Materials made from active, living, or robotic components can display emergent properties arising from local sensing and computation. Here, we realize a freestanding active metabeam with piezoelectric elements and electronic feed-forward…
Activity and renewability are distinctive features of living matter, and constitute a new class of materials that we term renewable active matter. A striking example is the cell cytoskeleton, where myosin filaments bind to the actin…
Rheological properties of chiral active materials have been an important area of research in the recent past, in particular regarding odd terms in their mechanical response. While much progress has been made in the study of odd viscous…
We study the flow behavior and unjamming transition in dense assemblies of actively deforming particles that periodically change size, a process that we refer to as breathing. Using extensive molecular dynamics simulations and a…
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…
We theoretically explore fluidization of epithelial tissues by active T1 neighbor exchanges. We show that the geometry of cell-cell junctions encodes important information about the local features of the energy landscape, which we support…
The rheological behavior of soft glassy materials basically results from the interplay between shearing forces and an intrinsic slow dynamics. This competition can be described by a microscopic theory, which can be viewed as a…
Dynamically crosslinked semiflexible biopolymers such as the actin cytoskeleton govern the mechanical behavior of living cells. Semiflexible biopolymers nonlinearly stiffen in response to mechanical loads, whereas the crosslinker dynamics…