Noise-induced transitions from contractile to extensile active stress in isotropic fluids

Abstract

Tissues of living cells are a prime example of active fluids. There is experimental evidence that tissues generate extensile active stress even though their constituting cells are contractile. Fluctuating forces that could result from cell-substrate interactions have been proposed to be able to induce a transition from contractile to extensile active stress. Through analytic calculations and numerical computations, we show that in isotropic active fluids, nonlinearities and a coupling between fluctuating forces and fluid density are necessary for such a transition to occur. Here, both transitions from extensile to contractile and vice versa are possible.

10 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles
• Spontaneous motion in hierarchically assembled active matter
• Complex Spontaneous Flows and Concentration Banding in Active Polar Films
• Crowding-Enhanced Diffusion: An Exact Theory for Highly Entangled Self-Propelled Stiff Filaments
• Fluctuations can induce local nematic order and extensile stress in monolayers of motile cells