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When stressed sufficiently, solid materials yield and deform plastically via reorganization of microscopic constituents. Indeed, it is possible to alter the micro-structure of materials by judicious application of stress, an empirical pro-…
Key traits of unicellular species, like cell size, often follow scale-free or self-similar distributions, hinting at the possibility of an underlying critical process. However, linking such empirical scaling laws to the critical regime of…
We study a model of contraction-based cell motility inside a microchannel to investigate the regulation of cell polarization and motion by the mechanical resistance of the environment. A positive feedback between the asymmetry of the…
Groups of cells, including clusters of cancerous cells, multicellular organisms, and developing organs, may both grow and break apart. What physical factors control these fractures? In these processes, what sets the eventual size of…
We introduce a general theoretical framework to study the shape dynamics of actively growing and remodeling surfaces. Using this framework we develop a physical model for growing bacterial cell walls and study the interplay of cell shape…
Recent experiments have illuminated a remarkable growth mechanism of rod-shaped bacteria: proteins associated with cell wall extension move at constant velocity in circles oriented approximately along the cell circumference (Garner et al.,…
We study non-compact scaling limits of uniform random planar quadrangulations with a boundary when their size tends to infinity. Depending on the asymptotic behavior of the boundary size and the choice of the scaling factor, we observe…
Stochastic models for pore collapse in granular materials are developed. First, a general fluctuating stress-strain relation for a plastic flow rule is derived. The fluctuations account for non-associativity in plastic deformations…
Plastic deformation of heterogeneous solid structures is often characterized by random intermittent local plastic events. On the mesoscale this feature can be represented by a spatially fluctuating local yield threshold. Here we study the…
The interplay between the diffusion-controlled dynamics of a solidification front and the trajectory of a grain boundary groove at the solid-liquid interface is studied by means of thin-sample directional solidification experiments of a…
Recently it has been reported that biased range-measurements among neighboring agents in the gradient distance-based formation control can lead to predictable collective motion. In this paper we take advantage of this effect and by…
Strongly correlated amorphous solids are a class of glass-formers whose inter-particle potential admits an approximate inverse power-law form in a relevant range of inter-particle distances. We study the steady-state plastic flow of such…
In real-world applications, observations are often constrained to a small fraction of a system. Such spatial subsampling can be caused by the inaccessibility or the sheer size of the system, and cannot be overcome by longer sampling.…
We extend the notions of multipole and subsystem symmetries to more general {\it spatially modulated} symmetries. We uncover two instances with exponential and (quasi)-periodic modulations, and provide simple microscopic models in one, two…
Microstructural evolution in structural materials is known to occur in response to mechanical loading and can often accommodate substantial plastic deformation through the coupled motion of grain boundaries (GBs). This can produce desirable…
The idealized general model of aggregate growth is considered on the basis of the simple additive rules that correspond to one-step aggregation process. The two idealized cases were analytically investigated and simulated by Monte Carlo…
A novel mechanism for cell differentiation is proposed, based on the dynamic clustering in a globally coupled chaotic system. A simple model with metabolic reaction, active transport of chemicals from media, and cell division is found to…
The equation which describes a particle diffusing in a logarithmic potential arises in diverse physical problems such as momentum diffusion of atoms in optical traps, condensation processes, and denaturation of DNA molecules. A detailed…
We investigate the positional behavior of a single bacterium confined within a vesicle by measuring the probability of locating the bacterium at a certain distance from the vesicle boundary. We observe that the distribution is…
Using demographic data of high spatial resolution for a region in the south of Europe, we study the population over fixed-size spatial cells. We find that, counterintuitively, the distribution of the number of inhabitants per cell increases…