Hydrodynamics of Turning Flocks

We present a hydrodynamic model of flocking that generalizes the familiar Toner-Tu equations to incorporate turning inertia of well-polarized flocks. The continuum equations controlled by only two dimensionless parameters, orientational inertia and alignment strength, are derived by coarse graining the inertial spin model recently proposed by Cavagna et al. The interplay between orientational inertia and bend elasticity of the flock yields anisotropic spin waves that mediate the propagation of turning information throughout the flock. The coupling between spin current density to the local vorticity field through a nonlinear friction gives rise to a hydrodynamic mode with angular-dependent propagation speed at long wavelength. This mode goes unstable as a result of the growth of bend and splay deformations augmented by the spin wave, signaling the transition to complex spatio-temporal patterns of continuously turning and swirling flocks.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

Motility-driven glass and jamming transitions in biological tissues

Cell motion inside dense tissues governs many biological processes, including embryonic development and cancer metastasis, and recent experiments suggest that these tissues exhibit collective glassy behavior. To make quantitative predictions about glass transitions in tissues, we study a self-propelled Voronoi (SPV) model that simultaneously captures polarized cell motility and multi-body cell-cell interactions in a confluent tissue, where there are no gaps between cells. We demonstrate that the model exhibits a jamming transition from a solid-like state to a fluid-like state that is controlled by three parameters: the single-cell motile speed, the persistence time of single-cell tracks, and a target shape index that characterizes the competition between cell-cell adhesion and cortical tension. In contrast to traditional particulate glasses, we are able to identify an experimentally accessible structural order parameter that specifies the entire jamming surface as a function of model parameters. We demonstrate that a continuum Soft Glassy Rheology model precisely captures this transition in the limit of small persistence times, and explain how it fails in the limit of large persistence times. These results provide a framework for understanding the collective solid-to-liquid transitions that have been observed in embryonic development and cancer progression, which may be associated with Epithelial-to-Mesenchymal transition in these tissues.Comment: accepted for publication in Physical Review X, 201

Correlating Cell Shape and Cellular Stress in Motile Confluent Tissues

Collective cell migration is a highly regulated process involved in wound healing, cancer metastasis and morphogenesis. Mechanical interactions among cells provide an important regulatory mechanism to coordinate such collective motion. Using a Self-Propelled Voronoi (SPV) model that links cell mechanics to cell shape and cell motility, we formulate a generalized mechanical inference method to obtain the spatio-temporal distribution of cellular stresses from measured traction forces in motile tissues and show that such traction-based stresses match those calculated from instantaneous cell shapes. We additionally use stress information to characterize the rheological properties of the tissue. We identify a motility-induced swim stress that adds to the interaction stress to determine the global contractility or extensibility of epithelia. We further show that the temporal correlation of the interaction shear stress determines an effective viscosity of the tissue that diverges at the liquid-solid transition, suggesting the possibility of extracting rheological information directly from traction data.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figure

Form Factors and Generalized Parton Distributions in Basis Light-Front Quantization

We calculate the elastic form factors and the Generalized Parton Distributions (GPDs) for four low-lying bound states of a demonstration fermion-antifermion system, strong coupling positronium ($e \bar{e}$), using Basis Light-Front Quantization (BLFQ). Using this approach, we also calculate the impact-parameter dependent GPDs $q(x, {\vec b_\perp})$ to visualize the fermion density in the transverse plane (${\vec b_\perp}$). We compare selected results with corresponding quantities in the non-relativistic limit to reveal relativistic effects. Our results establish the foundation within BLFQ for investigating the form factors and the GPDs for hadronic systems.Comment: 11 pages, 13 figure