Related papers: Self-organized flows break morphological symmetry …

Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…

Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We study the spatiotemporal patterns that emerge when an active nematicfilm of microtubules and…

Active matter embraces systems that self-organize at different length and time scales, often exhibiting turbulent flows. Here, we use a quasi-two-dimensional nematically ordered layer of a protein-based active gel to experimentally…

The dual role played by symmetry in many-body physics manifests itself through two fundamental mechanisms: spontaneous symmetry breaking and topological symmetry protection. These two concepts, ubiquitous in both condensed matter and high…

We simulate the nonlocal Stokesian hydrodynamics of an elastic filament which is active due a permanent distribution of stresslets along its contour. A bending instability of an initially straight filament spontaneously breaks flow symmetry…

We investigate how a symmetric penetrable object immersed in an active fluid becomes motile due to a negative drag acting in the direction of its velocity. While similar phenomena have been reported only for active fluids that posses polar…

Instabilities of fluid flows often generate turbulence. Using extensive direct numerical simulations, we study two-dimensional turbulence driven by a wavenumber-localised instability superposed on stochastic forcing, in contrast to previous…

The spontaneous emergence of collective flows is a generic property of active fluids and often leads to chaotic flow patterns characterised by swirls, jets, and topological disclinations in their orientation field. However, the ability to…

When considering flows in biological membranes, they are usually treated as flat, though more often than not, they are curved surfaces, even extremely curved, as in the case of the endoplasmic reticulum. Here, we study the topological…

We investigate how symmetry, exact coherent structures (ECSs), and their invariant manifolds organize spontaneous flow reversals in a 2D active nematic confined to a periodic channel. In minimal flow units commensurate with the intrinsic…

Many active biological particles, such as swimming microorganisms or motor-proteins, do work on their environment by going though a periodic sequence of shapes. Interactions between particles can lead to the phase-synchronization of their…

We investigate numerically, by a hybrid lattice Boltzmann method, the morphology and the dynamics of an emulsion made of a polar active gel, contractile or extensile, and an isotropic passive fluid. We focus on the case of a highly…

The two-dimensional ideal fluid and the plasma confined by a strong magnetic field exhibit an intrinsic tendency to organization due to the inverse spectral cascade. In the asymptotic states reached at relaxation the turbulence has vanished…

The spontaneous self-organization of two-dimensional magnetized plasma is investigated within the framework of magnetohydrodynamics with a particular emphasis on the symmetry-breaking induced by the shape of the confining boundaries. This…

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.…

Theories of self-organized active fluid surfaces have emerged as an important class of minimal models for the shape dynamics of biological membranes, cells and tissues. However, due to their inherent geometric nonlinearities and the absence…

We use computer simulations to study the morphology and rheological properties of a bidimensional emulsion resulting from a mixture of a passive isotropic fluid and an active contractile polar gel, in the presence of a surfactant that…

An exact description is provided of an almost spherical fluid vesicle with a fixed area and a fixed enclosed volume locally deformed by external normal forces bringing two nearby points on the surface together symmetrically. The conformal…

Liquid shells (e.g. double emulsions, vesicles etc.) are susceptible to interfacial instability and rupturing when driven out of mechanical equilibrium. This poses a significant challenge for the design of liquid shell based micro-machines,…

The problem of low Reynolds number turbulence in active nematic fluids is theoretically addressed. Using numerical simulations I demonstrate that an incompressible turbulent flow, in two-dimensional active nematics, consists of an ensemble…