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.
Recent numerical studies on glassy systems provide evidences for a population of non-Goldstone modes (NGMs) in the low-frequency spectrum of the vibrational density of states $D(omega)$. Similarly to Goldstone modes (GMs), i. e., phonons in solids, N
GMs are soft low-energy excitations. However, differently from GMs, NGMs are localized excitations. Here we first show that the parental temperature $T^*$ modifies the GM/NGM ratio in $D(omega)$. In particular, the phonon attenuation is reflected in a parental temperature dependency of the exponent $s(T^*)$ in the low-frequency power law $D(omega) sim omega^{s(T^*)}$, with $2 leq s(T^*) leq 4 $. Secondly, by comparing $s(T^*)$ with $s(p)$, i. e., the same quantity obtained by pinning mttp{a} $p$ particle fraction, we suggest that $s(T^*)$ reflects the presence of dynamical heterogeneous regions of size $xi^3 propto p$. Finally, we provide an estimate of $xi$ as a function of $T^*$, finding a mild power law divergence, $xi sim (T^* - T_d)^{-alpha/3}$, with $T_d$ the dynamical crossover temperature and $alpha$ falling in the range $alpha in [0.8,1.0]$.
