No Arabic abstract
A large class of mesoscopic or macroscopic flocking theories are coarse-grained from microscopic models that feature binary interactions as the chief aligning mechanism. However while such theories seemingly predict the existence of polar order with just binary interactions, actomyosin motility assay experiments show that binary interactions are insufficient to obtain polar order, especially at high densities. To resolve this paradox, here we introduce a solvable one-dimensional flocking model and derive its stochastic hydrodynamics. We show that two-body interactions are insufficient to generate polar order unless the noise is non-Gaussian. We show that noisy three-body interactions in the microscopic theory allow us to capture all essential dynamical features of the flocking transition, in systems that achieve orientational order above a critical density.
We introduce and study in two dimensions a new class of dry, aligning, active matter that exhibits a direct transition to orientational order, without the phase-separation phenomenology usually observed in this context. Characterized by self-propelled particles with velocity reversals and ferromagnetic alignment of polarities, systems in this class display quasi-long-range polar order with continuously-varying scaling exponents and yet a numerical study of the transition leads to conclude that it does not belong to the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class, but is best described as a standard critical point with algebraic divergence of correlations. We rationalize these findings by showing that the interplay between order and density changes the role of defects.
Experimental evidence shows that there is a feedback between cell shape and cell motion. How this feedback impacts the collective behavior of dense cell monolayers remains an open question. We investigate the effect of a feedback that tends to align the cell crawling direction with cell elongation in a biological tissue model. We find that the alignment interaction promotes nematic patterns in the fluid phase that eventually undergo a non-equilibrium phase transition into a quasi-hexagonal solid. Meanwhile, highly asymmetric cells do not undergo the liquid-to-solid transition for any value of the alignment coupling. In this regime, the dynamics of cell centers and shape fluctuation show features typical of glassy systems.
Large-scale molecular dynamics simulations are performed to predict the structural and thermodynamic properties of liquid krypton using a potential energy function based on the two-body potential of Aziz and Slaman plus the triple-dipole Axilrod-Teller (AT) potential. By varying the strength of the AT potential we study the influence of three-body contribution beyond the triple-dipole dispersion. It is seen that the AT potential gives an overall good description of liquid Kr, though other contributions such as higher order three-body dispersion and exchange terms cannot be ignored.
We study the strain response to steady imposed stress in a spatially homogeneous, scalar model for shear thickening, in which the local rate of yielding Gamma(l) of mesoscopic `elastic elements is not monotonic in the local strain l. Despite this, the macroscopic, steady-state flow curve (stress vs. strain rate) is monotonic. However, for a broad class of Gamma(l), the response to steady stress is not in fact steady flow, but spontaneous oscillation. We discuss this finding in relation to other theoretical and experimental flow instabilities. Within the parameter ranges we studied, the model does not exhibit rheo-chaos.
We study the fluctuation-induced Casimir interactions in colloidal suspensions, especially between colloids immersed in a binary liquid close to its critical demixing point. To simulate these systems, we present a highly efficient cluster Monte Carlo algorithm based on geometric symmetries of the Hamiltonian. Utilizing the principle of universality, the medium is represented by an Ising system while the colloids are areas of spins with fixed orientation. Our results for the Casimir interaction potential between two particles at the critical point in two dimensions perfectly agree with the exact predictions. However, we find that in finite systems the behavior strongly depends on whether the $Z_{2}$ symmetry of the system is broken by the particles. Eventually we present Monte Carlo results for the three-body Casimir interaction potential and take a close look onto the case of one particle in the vicinity of two adjacent particles, which can be calculated from the two-particle interaction by a conformal mapping. These results emphasize the failure of the common decomposition approach for many-particle critical Casimir interactions.