Short-range correlation of stress chains near solid-to-liquid transition in active monolayers
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1.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Using a three-dimensional model of cell monolayers, we study the spatial organization of active stress chains as the monolayer transitions from a solid to a liquid state. The critical exponents that characterize this transition map the isotropic stress percolation onto the two-dimensional random percolation universality class, suggesting short-range stress correlations near this transition. This mapping is achieved via two distinct, independent pathways: (i) cell–cell adhesion and (ii) active traction forces. We unify our findings by linking the nature of this transition to high-stress fluctuations, distinctly linked to each pathway. The results elevate the importance of the transmission of mechanical information in dense active matter and provide a new context for understanding the non-equilibrium statistical physics of phase transition in active systems.
Copyright and License
© 2024 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
Acknowledgement
S.M. is thankful for insightful feedback from Jacob Notbohm and Aboutaleb Amiri and discussions with Matthieu Wyart and David R. Nelson.
Funding
S.M. is grateful for the generous support of the Rosenfeld Foundation fellowship at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. S.M., G.R. and J.A. acknowledge support for this research provided by US ARO funding through the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant no. W911NF-19-1-0245. A.D. acknowledges funding from the Novo Nordisk Foundation (grant no. NNF18SA0035142 and NERD grant no. NNF21OC0068687), Villum Fonden grant no. 29476, and the European Union via the ERC-Starting Grant PhysCoMeT.
Contributions
S.M.: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, software, visualization, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing; G.R.: conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, resources, supervision, writing—review and editing; J.E.A.: conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, resources, supervision, writing—review and editing; A.D.: conceptualization, funding acquisition, methodology, project administration, resources, supervision, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing.
All authors gave final approval for publication and agreed to be held accountable for the work performed therein.
Data Availability
The current manuscript is a computational study, so no data have been generated for this manuscript. Modelling code is available here [89]. Data and post-processing codes can be found here [90].
Electronic supplementary material is available online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.7209354.
Conflict of Interest
We declare we have no competing interests.
Ethics
This work did not require ethical approval from a human subject or animal welfare committee.
Additional Information
We have not used AI-assisted technologies in creating this article.
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Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC11077009
- Rosenfeld Foundation
- United States Army Research Office
- W911NF-19-1-0245
- Novo Nordisk Foundation
- NNF18SA0035142
- Novo Nordisk Foundation
- NNF21OC0068687
- Villum Fonden
- 29476
- European Research Council
- 101041418
- Caltech groups
- GALCIT