Related papers: Active Fluid Patterning in Inhomogeneous Environme…
Pattern formation in active biological matter typically arises from the feedback between chemical concentration fields and mechanical stresses. The actomyosin cortex of cells is an archetypal example of an active thin film that displays…
Organisms often swim through fluids that are spatially inhomogeneous. If the fluids are polymeric, gradients in polymer concentration may lead to gradients in both fluid viscosity and elasticity. In this letter, we present theoretical…
Biomembranes wrapping cells and organelles are not only the partitions that separate the insides but also dynamic fields for biological functions accompanied by membrane shape changes. In this review, we discuss the spatiotemporal patterns…
The emergence of hydrodynamic bend instabilities in ordered suspensions of active particles is widely observed across diverse living and synthetic systems, and is considered to be governed by dipolar active stresses generated by the…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
We study the hydrodynamics and shape changes of chemically active droplets. In non-spherical droplets, surface tension generates hydrodynamic flows that drive liquid droplets into a spherical shape. Here we show that spherical droplets that…
Active emulsions can spontaneously form self-propelled droplets or phoretic micropumps. It has been predicted that the interaction with their self-generated chemical fields can lead to multistable higher-order flows and chemodynamic…
Active swarms, consisting of individual agents which consume energy to move or produce work, are known to generate a diverse range of collective behaviors. Many examples of active swarms are biological in nature (e.g., fish shoals and bird…
Temperature plays a very important role in various biological processes like the evolution of life, as it is anticipated that early life existed in a very hot environment that eventually cooled down with time. In vitro experiments,…
Mutualisms are key for structuring ecological communities, but they are sensitive to environmental change and fluctuations in population size. Consequently, how mutualisms achieve stability remains an open question in ecological theory.…
Channel formation and branching is widely seen in physical systems where movement of fluid through a porous structure causes the spatiotemporal evolution of the medium in response to the flow, in turn causing flow pathways to evolve. We…
Inspired by dense contractile tissues, where cells are subject to periodic deformation, we formulate and study a generic hydrodynamic theory of pulsating active liquids. Combining mechanical and phenomenological arguments, we postulate that…
Stochasticity is a defining feature of the pairwise forces governing interactions in biological systems-from molecular motors to cell-cell adhesion-yet its consequences on large-scale dynamics remain poorly understood. Here, we show that…
Flows over remarkably long distances are crucial to the functioning of many organisms, across all kingdoms of life. Coordinated flows are fundamental to power deformations, required for migration or development, or to spread resources and…
We review recent advances in the design, synthesis, and modeling of active fluids. Active fluids have been at the center of many technological innovations and theoretical advances over the past two decades. Research on this new class of…
The topological properties of many materials are central to their behavior, with the dynamics of topological defects being particularly important to intrinsically out-of-equilibrium, active materials. In this paper, local manipulation of…
Active fluids operate by constantly dissipating energy at the particle level to perform a directed motion, yielding dynamics and phases without any equilibrium equivalent. The emerging behaviors have been studied extensively, yet…
A living cell actively generates traction forces on its environment with its actin cytoskeleton. These forces deform the cell elastic substrate which, in turn, affects the traction forces exerted by the cell and can consequently modify the…
How internal forces are transduced into motion through soft, fluid membranes remains a fundamental question in the study of active systems. To investigate this coupling, we develop a minimal system consisting of a single ferromagnetic…
Inspired by recent experimental observation of patterning at the membrane of a living cell, we propose a generic model for the dynamics of a fluctuating interface driven by particle-like inclusions which stimulate its growth. We find that…