Related papers: Nonreciprocal buckling makes active filaments poly…
Elastic strips provide a canonical system for studying the mechanisms governing elastic shape transitions. Buckling, linear snap-through, and nonlinear snap-through have been observed in boundary-actuated strips and linked to the type of…
Living organisms employ diverse strategies to navigate confined environments. Inspired by translocation observations on California blackworms (\textit{Lumbriculus variegatus}), we combine biological experiments and active-polymer…
We study the elastic properties of a rigid filament in a bath of self-propelled particles. We find that while fully flexible filaments swell monotonically upon increasing the strength of the propelling force, rigid filaments soften for…
We consider a biopolymer bundle consisting of filaments that are crosslinked together. The crosslinks are reversible: they can dynamically bind and unbind adjacent filament pairs as controlled by a binding enthalpy. The bundle is subjected…
Active matter comprised of self-propelled interacting units holds a major promise for extraction of useful work from its seemingly chaotic out-of-equilibrium dynamics. Streamlining active matter to produce work is especially important at…
A single flexible filament can be actuated to escape from the scallop theorem and generate net propulsion at low Reynolds number. In this work, we study the dynamics of a simple boundary-driven multi-filament swimmer, a two-arm clamshell…
Active polymers possess numerous unique properties that are quite different from those observed in the system of small active molecule due to the intricate interplay between their activity and topological constraints. This study focuses on…
Many biological processes involve the action of molecular motors that interact with the cell cytoskeleton. Some processes, such as the transport of cargoes is achieved mainly by the action of individual motors. Other, such as cell motility…
On perfectly vertical surfaces, rolling is conventionally deemed impossible without external torque. While various species like geckos and spiders exhibit vertical locomotion, they cannot achieve rolling; instead, they fall. In this study,…
Soft slender structures are ubiquitous in natural and artificial systems and can be observed at scales that range from the nanometric to the kilometric, from polymers to space tethers. We present a practical numerical approach to simulate…
The field of active nematics has traditionally employed descriptions based on dipolar activity, with interactions that align along a single axis. However, it has been theoretically predicted that interactions with a substrate, prevalent in…
Ordered, collective motions commonly arise spontaneously in systems of many interacting, active units, ranging from cellular tissues and bacterial colonies to self-propelled colloids and animal flocks. Active phases are especially rich when…
Active solids such as cell collectives, colloidal clusters, and active metamaterials exhibit diverse collective phenomena, ranging from rigid body motion to shape-changing mechanisms. The nonlinear dynamics of such active materials remains…
The appearance of emergent symmetries in complex systems with components that can form composite units provides us with opportunities for design and control of exotic phase behaviour, for example by exploiting the dynamical symmetry…
Active filaments driven by tangential forces can become trapped in a spinning state when attached to a heavy head, where activity and inertia drive persistent rotation rather than directed transport. Using three-dimensional Langevin…
We model analytically the dynamics of a cytoskeletal filament in a motility assay. The filament is described as rigid rod free to slide in two dimensions. The motor proteins consist of polymeric tails tethered to the plane and modeled as…
Many active matter systems consist of different particle types that interact via nonreciprocal couplings. Such nonreciprocal couplings can lead to the spontaneous emergence of time-dependent states that break parity-time symmetry. On the…
Active matter systems evade the constraints of thermal equilibrium, leading to the emergence of intriguing collective behavior. A paradigmatic example is given by motor-filament mixtures, where the motion of motor proteins drives alignment…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
In nature interactions between biopolymers and motor proteins give rise to biologically essential emergent behaviours. Besides cytoskeleton mechanics, active nematics arise from such interactions. Here we present a study on 3D active…