相关论文: Quantification of Nematic Cell Polarity in Three-d…
Various possibilities of polar self-organisation in low molar mass nematic, smectic and columnar liquid crystals are discussed with particular focus on the underlying molecular symmetries and interactions. Distinction is made between vector…
Building on the striking similarity between the structure of the spindle during mitosis in living cells and nematic textures in confined liquid crystals, we use a continuum model of two-dimensional nematic liquid crystal droplets, to…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…
The ability to manipulate polar entities with multiple external fields opens exciting possibilities for emerging functionalities and novel applications in spin systems, photonics, metamaterials, and soft matter. Liquid crystals (LCs),…
We study the angular structure of polarization of light transmitted through a nematic liquid crystal (NLC) cell by theoretically analyzing the polarization state as a function of the incidence angles. For a uniformly aligned NLC cell, the…
Ordered polarity alignment of a cell population plays a vital role in biology, such as in hair follicle alignment and asymmetric cell division. Here, we propose a theoretical framework for the understanding of generic dynamical properties…
We study the vertex model for epithelial tissue mechanics extended to include coupling between the cell shapes and tensions in cell-cell junctions. This coupling represents an active force which drives the system out of equilibrium and…
Both uniaxial and biaxial nematic liquid crystals are defined by orientational ordering of their building blocks. While uniaxial nematics only orient the long molecular axis, biaxial order implies local order along three axes. As the…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
Spatiotemporal patterns in multicellular systems are important to understanding tissue dynamics, for instance, during embryonic development and disease. Here, we use a multiphase field model to study numerically the behavior of a…
So-called polar liquid crystals possess spontaneous long-range mutual orientation of their electric dipole moments, conferring bulk polarity to fluid phases of matter. The combination of polarity and fluidity leads to complex phase…
Nematic liquid crystals possess three different phases: isotropic, uniaxial, and biaxial. The ground state of most nematics is either isotropic or uniaxial, depending on the external temperature. Nevertheless, biaxial domains have been…
Biological processes such as embryogenesis, wound healing and cancer progression, crucially rely on the ability of epithelial cells to coordinate their mechanical activity over length scales order of magnitudes larger than the typical…
Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
Cell polarity refers to the spatial asymmetry of molecules on the cell membrane. Altschuler, Angenent, Wang and Wu have proposed a stochastic model for studying the emergence of polarity in the presence of feedback between molecules. We…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
Topological defects provide a unifying language to describe how orientational order breaks down in active and living matter. Considering cells as elongated particles confluent, epithelial tissues can be interpreted as nematic fields and its…
We show that surface interactions can vectorially structure the three-dimensional polariza-tion field of a ferroelectric fluid. The contact between a ferroelectric nematic liquid crystal and a surface with in-plane polarity generates a…
Ferroelectric nematic phases are a new class of polar fluids in which spontaneous polarization is directly coupled to the orientational order, providing unique opportunities for creating self-organized materils with spatially modulated…
Active forces occurring within cells can drive crucial biological processes that involve spontaneous organization and shape change, such as cell division. Motivated by recent in vitro experiments of nematic droplets of cytoskeletal…