Active Jamming: Self-propelled soft particles at high density

We study numerically the phases and dynamics of a dense collection of self-propelled particles with soft repulsive interactions in two dimensions. The model is motivated by recent in vitro experiments on confluent monolayers of migratory epithelial and endothelial cells. The phase diagram exhibits a liquid phase with giant number fluctuations at low packing fraction and high self-propulsion speed and a jammed phase at high packing fraction and low self-propulsion speed. The dynamics of the jammed phase is controlled by the low frequency modes of the jammed packing.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Athermal Phase Separation of Self-Propelled Particles with no Alignment

We study numerically and analytically a model of self-propelled polar disks on a substrate in two dimensions. The particles interact via isotropic repulsive forces and are subject to rotational noise, but there is no aligning interaction. As a result, the system does not exhibit an ordered state. The isotropic fluid phase separates well below close packing and exhibits the large number fluctuations and clustering found ubiquitously in active systems. Our work shows that this behavior is a generic property of systems that are driven out of equilibrium locally, as for instance by self propulsion.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Structure and mechanics of active colloids

11 pages Acknowledgments MCM thanks Xingbo Yang and Lisa Manning for their contribution to some aspects of the work reviewed here and for fruitful discussions. MCM was supported by NSF-DMR-305184. MCM and AP acknowledge support by the NSF IGERT program through award NSF-DGE-1068780. MCM, AP and DY were additionally supported by the Soft Matter Program at Syracuse University. AP acknowledges use of the Syracuse University HTC Campus Grid which is supported by NSF award ACI-1341006. YF was supported by NSF grant DMR-1149266 and the Brandeis Center for Bioinspired Soft Materials, an NSF MRSEC, DMR-1420382.Peer reviewedPreprin

Cooperative Self-Propulsion of Active and Passive Rotors

Using minimal models for low Reynolds number passive and active rotors in a fluid, we characterize the hydrodynamic interactions among rotors and the resulting dynamics of a pair of interacting rotors. This allows us to treat in a common framework passive or externally driven rotors, such as magnetic colloids driven by a rotating magnetic field, and active or internally driven rotors, such as sperm cells confined at boundaries. The hydrodynamic interaction of passive rotors contains an azimuthal component 1/r2 to dipolar order that can yield the recently discovered “cooperative self-propulsion” of a pair of rotors of opposite vorticity. While this interaction is identically zero for active rotors as a consequence of torque balance, we show that a 1/r4 azimuthal component of the interaction arises in active systems to octupolar order. Cooperative self-propulsion, although weaker, can therefore also occur for pairs of active rotors

Remote Sensing of Snow in the Solar Spectrum: Experiments in the French Alps.

Two experiments were perfonned irliApril and December 1992 in the French Alps using simultaneous relnote sensing and ground truth data. Snow grain site and soot content of samples collected in thefield were measured. The Landsat thematic mapper (TM) sensor was used because it has a good spatial resolution, a middle infrared channel which is sensitive to grain size and a thermal infraredchannel. Firstj the reflectance data were compared with the theoretical results obtained from a bidirectional reflectance model. Then, some remote sehstng-derived snow parameters wbre comparediWith the outpllt ofa snow metamorphism model (CROCUS),viz., lower elevation of the snowcover, lhe surface grl1in size and the surface temperature. A digital elevation model was used to obtain thelocal incidenc:f angles and the elevation of each snow pixel. The pixels were then grouped according to CROCUS classification (range, elevation, slope, and orientation) and the mean snow chart;cheracteristicsfor each class were .compared with the tROCUS results. The lower limit of snow and the surface grain size derived from TM data were compared favourably with the model results. Larger differences werefound for the temperature, because it varies rapidly and is very sensitive to shadowing by the snrrounding mountains and also because its remote measurement is dependent on atmospheric conditions

In-situ Microwave Brightness Temperature Variability from Ground-based Radiometer Measurements at Dome C in Antarctica Induced by Wind-formed Features

Space-borne microwave radiometers are among the most useful tools to study snow and to collect information on the Antarctic climate. They have several advantages over other remote sensing techniques: high sensitivity to snow properties of interest (temperature, grain size, density), subdaily coverage in the polar regions, and their observations are independent of cloud conditions and solar illumination. Thus, microwave radiometers are widely used to retrieve information over snow-covered regions. For the Antarctic Plateau, many studies presenting retrieval algorithms or numerical simulations have assumed, explicitly or not, that the subpixel-scale heterogeneity is negligible and that the retrieved properties were representative of whole pixels. In this presentation, we investigate the spatial variations of brightness temperature over arange of a few kilometers in the Dome C area (Antarctic Plateau)

Climate variability along latitudinal and longitudinal transects in East Antarctica

AbstractIn the framework of the International Trans-Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) programme, France and Italy carried out a traverse along one west–east and two north–south transects in East Antarctica from November 2001 to January 2002. Eighteen shallow snow–firn cores were drilled, and surface snow samples were collected every 5km along the traverse. Firn temperatures were measured in boreholes down to 30 m. The cores were analyzed for β radioactivity to obtain snow accumulation-rate data. The surface snow samples were analyzed for δ18O to correlate isotopic values with borehole temperatures. Multiple regression analysis shows a global near-dry-adiabatic lapse rate and a latitudinal lapse rate of 1.05˚C(˚ lat. S)–1, in the Dome C drainage area. Analysis of firn temperatures reveals a super-adiabatic lapse rate along the ice divide between Talos Dome and the Southern Ocean coast, and in some sectors along the ice divide between the Astrolabe Basin and D59. Snow accumulation rates and firn temperatures show warmer temperatures and higher accumulation values close to the ice divides extending from Talos Dome and Dome C to the Southern Ocean. The spatial pattern of data is linked with a katabatic-wind-source basin and moisture-source region

Simulation of the Microwave Emission of Multi-layered Snowpacks Using the Dense Media Radiative Transfer Theory: the DMRT-ML Model

DMRT-ML is a physically based numerical model designed to compute the thermal microwave emission of a given snowpack. Its main application is the simulation of brightness temperatures at frequencies in the range 1-200 GHz similar to those acquired routinely by spacebased microwave radiometers. The model is based on the Dense Media Radiative Transfer (DMRT) theory for the computation of the snow scattering and extinction coefficients and on the Discrete Ordinate Method (DISORT) to numerically solve the radiative transfer equation. The snowpack is modeled as a stack of multiple horizontal snow layers and an optional underlying interface representing the soil or the bottom ice. The model handles both dry and wet snow conditions. Such a general design allows the model to account for a wide range of snow conditions. Hitherto, the model has been used to simulate the thermal emission of the deep firn on ice sheets, shallow snowpacks overlying soil in Arctic and Alpine regions, and overlying ice on the large icesheet margins and glaciers. DMRT-ML has thus been validated in three very different conditions: Antarctica, Barnes Ice Cap (Canada) and Canadian tundra. It has been recently used in conjunction with inverse methods to retrieve snow grain size from remote sensing data. The model is written in Fortran90 and available to the snow remote sensing community as an open-source software. A convenient user interface is provided in Python

Pressure is not a state function for generic active fluids

Pressure is the mechanical force per unit area that a confined system exerts on its container. In thermal equilibrium, it depends only on bulk properties (density, temperature, etc.) through an equation of state. Here we show that in a wide class of active systems the pressure depends on the precise interactions between the active particles and the confining walls. In general, therefore, active fluids have no equation of state, their mechanical pressures exhibit anomalous properties that defy the familiar thermodynamic reasoning that holds in equilibrium. The pressure remains a function of state, however, in some specific and well-studied active models that tacitly restrict the character of the particle-wall and/or particle-particle interactions.Comment: 8 pages + 9 SI pages, Nature Physics (2015