Related papers: Using the force landscape of an active solid to pr…
The interaction of crack fronts with asperities is central to the criteria of fracture in heterogeneous materials and for predicting fracture surface formation. It is known how dynamic crack fronts respond to small, 1st-order,…
The complexity and unpredictability of postbuckling responses in even simple thin shells have raised great challenges to emerging technologies exploiting buckling transitions. Here we comprehensively survey the buckling landscapes to show…
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…
We propose a hydrodynamic theory to examine the emergence of contraction waves in dense active liquids composed of pulsating deformable particles. Our theory couples the liquid density with a chemical phase that determines the periodic…
Condensates of active particles such as cells form almost-crystalline lattices which play a central role in many biological systems. Typically, their properties have been determined merely by analogy to the rather trivial one-dimensional…
We start from a variational model for nematic elastomers that involves two energies: mechanical and nematic. The first one consists of a nonlinear elastic energy which is influenced by the orientation of the molecules of the nematic…
With increasing emphasis on the study of active solids, the features of these classes of nonequilibrium systems and materials beyond their mere existence shift into focus. One concept of active solids addresses them as active,…
The production of mechanical stresses in living organisms largely relies on localized, force-generating active units embedded in filamentous matrices. Numerical simulations of discrete fiber networks with fixed boundaries have shown that…
We study the spatio-temporal dynamics of a model of polar active fluid in two dimensions. The system exhibits a transition from an isotropic to a polarized state as a function of density. The uniform polarized state is, however, unstable…
Active tissues exhibit tension fluctuations that are correlated in space and time. We study a minimal overdamped surface model in which such fluctuations enter as a zero-mean, multiplicative modulation of the local surface tension. Although…
We show that dense active fluids comprising interacting particles with persistent self-propulsion are driven to a non-equilibrium steady state consisting of co-moving particles with co-aligned active forces. This velocity and force sorting…
We show from experiments and simulations on vibration-activated granular matter that self-propelled polar rods in an elastic medium on a substrate turn and move towards each other. We account for this effective attraction through a…
Alternative approach for description of the non-equilibrium phenomena arising in solids at a severe external loading is analyzed. The approach is based on the new form of kinetic equations in terms of the internal and modified free energy.…
Microstructural changes in solids, driven by energy flows, do not develop in a static continuous space, such as the space considered in conventional plasticity models. The applied forces create an evolving internal energy landscape, which…
The ability to dictate colloid motion is an important challenge in fields ranging from materials science to living systems. Here, by embedding energy landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystals, we design a versatile platform to define…
Unlike equilibrium systems, active matter is not governed by the conventional laws of thermodynamics. Through a series of analytic calculations and Langevin dynamics simulations, we explore how systems cross over from equilibrium to active…
An action functional is developed for nonlinear dislocation dynamics. This serves as a first step towards the application of effective field theory in physics to evaluate its potential in obtaining a macroscopic description of dislocation…
Topological mechanical metamaterials have enabled new ways to control stress and deformation propagation. Exemplified by Maxwell lattices, they have been studied extensively using a linearized formalism. Herein, we study a two-dimensional…
We consider two minimal models of active fluid droplets that exhibit complex dynamics including steady motion, deformation, rotation and oscillating motion. First we consider a droplet with a concentration of active contractile matter…
A controllable soft solid is realised in vortex matter in a type II superconductor. The two-dimensional unit cell area can be varied by a factor of $10^4$ in the solid phase, without a change of crystal symmetry offering easy exploration of…