Hyperdisordered cell packing on a growing surface

Abstract

While the physics of disordered packing in non-growing systems is well understood, unexplored phenomena can emerge when packing takes place in growing domains. We study the arrangements of pigment cells (chromatophores) on squid skin as a biological example of a packed system on an expanding surface. We find that relative density fluctuations in cell numbers grow with spatial scale. We term this behavior ``hyperdisordered'', in contrast with hyperuniform behavior in which relative fluctuations tend to zero at large scale. We find that hyperdisordered scaling, akin to that of a critical system, is quantitatively reproduced by a model in which hard disks are randomly inserted in a homogeneously growing surface. In addition, we find that chromatophores increase in size during animal development, but maintain a stationary size distribution. The physical mechanisms described in our work may apply to a broad class of growing dense systems.

13 pages, 7 figures, accepted version

References in corpus (9)

• Diagnosing hyperuniformity in two-dimensional disordered jammed-packings of soft spheres
• Confinement-induced self-organization in growing bacterial colonies
• Structural Characterization of Many-Particle Systems on Approach to Hyperuniform States
• Leaf growth is conformal
• Hyperuniformity in the Manna Model, Conserved Directed Percolation and Depinning
• Non-equilibrium dynamic hyperuniform states
• Hyperuniformity in phase ordering: the roles of activity, noise, and non-constant mobility
• Local order metrics for many-particle systems across length scales
• Anti-hyperuniform diluted vortex matter induced by correlated disorder

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Impact of Random Spatial Truncation and Reciprocal-Space Binning on the Detection of Hyperuniformity in Disordered Systems