julicher@pks.mpg.de

We study phase transitions and the nature of order in a class of classical generalized O(N ) nonlinear σ-models (NLS) constructed by minimally coupling pure NLS with additional degrees of freedom in the form of (i) Ising ferromagnetic spins, (ii) an advective Stokesian velocity and (iii) multiplicative noises. In examples (i) and (ii), and also (iii) with the associated multiplicative noise being not sufficiently long-ranged, we show that the models may display a class of unusual phase transitions between stiff and soft phases, where the effective spin stiffness, respectively, diverges and vanishes in the long wavelength limit at two dimensions (2d), unlike in pure NLS. In the stiff phase, in the thermodynamic limit the variance of the transverse spin (or, the Goldstone mode) fluctuations are found to scale with the system size L in 2d as ln ln L with a model-dependent amplitude, that is markedly weaker than the well-known ln L-dependence of the variance of the broken symmetry modes in models that display quasi-long range order in 2d. Equivalently, for N = 2 at 2d the equal-time spin-spin correlations decay in powers of inverse logarithm of the spatial separation with model-dependent exponents. These transitions are controlled by the model parameters those couple the O(N ) spins with the additional variables. In the presence of long-range noises in example (iii), true long-range order may set in 2d, depending upon the specific details of the underlying dynamics. Our results should be useful in understanding phase transitions in equilibrium and nonequilibrium low-dimensional systems with continuous symmetries in general.

We construct a coarse-grained effective two-dimensional (2d hydrodynamic theory as a theoretical model for a coupled system of a fluid membrane and a thin layer of a polar active fluid in its ordered state that is anchored to the membrane. We show that such a system is prone to generic instabilities through the interplay of nonequilibrium drive, polar order and membrane fluctuation. We use our model equations to calculate diffusion coefficients of an inclusion in the membrane and show that their values depend strongly on the system size, in contrast to their equilibrium values. Our work extends the work of S. Sankararaman and S. Ramaswamy (Phys. Rev. Lett., 102, 118107 (2009)) to a coupled system of a fluid membrane and an ordered active fluid layer. Our model is broadly inspired by and should be useful as a starting point for theoretical descriptions of the coupled dynamics of a cell membrane and a cortical actin layer anchored to it.

Generic inhomogeneous steady states in an asymmetric exclusion process on a ring with a pair of point bottlenecks are studied. We show that, due to an underlying universal feature, measurements of coarse-grained steady-state densities in this model resolve the bottleneck structures only partially. Unexpectedly, it displays localization-delocalization transitions and confinement of delocalized domain walls, controlled by the interplay between particle number conservation and bottleneck competition for moderate particle densities.

Recent experimental studies have demonstrated that cellular motion can be directed by topographical gradients, such as those resulting from spatial variations in the features of a micropatterned substrate. This phenomenon, known as topotaxis, is especially prominent among cells persistently crawling within a spatially varying distribution of cell-sized obstacles. In this article we introduce a toy model of topotaxis based on active Brownian particles constrained to move in a lattice of obstacles, with space-dependent lattice spacing. Using numerical simulations and analytical arguments, we demonstrate that topographical gradients introduce a spatial modulation of the particles' persistence, leading to directed motion toward regions of higher persistence. Our results demonstrate that persistent motion alone is sufficient to drive topotaxis and could serve as a starting point for more detailed studies on self-propelled particles and cells. arXiv:1908.06078v1 [cond-mat.soft]

We consider a one-dimensional totally asymmetric exclusion process on a ring with extended inhomogeneities, consisting of several segments with different hopping rates. Depending upon the underlying inhomogeneity configurations and for moderate densities, our model displays both localised (LDW) and delocalised (DDW) domain walls and delocalisation transitions of LDWs in the steady states. Our results allow us to construct the possible steady state density profiles for arbitrary number of segments with unequal hopping rates. We explore the scaling properties of the fluctuations of LDWs and DDWs.

We present a theoretical study of the dynamics of a thick polar epithelium subjected to the action of both an electric and a flow field in a planar geometry. We develop a generalized continuum hydrodynamic description and describe the tissue as a two component fluid system. The cells and the interstitial fluid are the two components and we keep all terms allowed by symmetry. In particular we keep track of the cell pumping activity for both solvent flow and electric current and discuss the corresponding orders of magnitude. We study the growth dynamics of a tissue slab, its steady states and obtain the dependence of the cell velocity, net cell division rate, and cell stress on the flow strength and the applied electric field. We find that finite thickness tissue slabs exist only in a restricted region of phase space and that relatively modest electric fields or imposed external flows can induce either proliferation or death. Our model can be tested in well controlled experiments on in vitro epithelial sheets, which will open the way to systematic studies of field effects on tissue dynamics.

We investigate the scaling properties of phase transitions between survival and extinction (active-to-absorbing-state phase transition, AAPT) in a model that by itself belongs to the directed percolation (DP) universality class, interacting with a spatiotemporally fluctuating environment having its own nontrivial dynamics. We model the environment by (i) a randomly stirred fluid, governed by the Navier-Stokes (NS) equation, and (ii) a fluctuating surface, described either by the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) or the Edward-Wilkinson (EW) equations. We show, by using a one-loop perturbative field theoretic setup that, depending upon the spatial scaling of the variance of the external forces that drive the environment (i.e., the NS, KPZ, or EW equations), the system may show weak or strong dynamic scaling at the critical point of active-to-absorbing-state phase transitions. In the former case AAPT displays scaling belonging to the DP universality class, whereas in the latter case the universal behavior is different.