Rheology and Mechanics of Active Glasses

2026-07-22

The mechanics and flow behaviour of living or active matter is key to biological processes like wound healing or cancer metastasis, but today there is very limited understanding of what governs the mechanical properties of such dense active systems. The proposed project will harness tools from the Statistical Physics of Glasses to provide new fundamental insights into Active Matter mechanics and rheology. This will not only help understand the deformation and flow of living glassy systems but also pave the way to the creation of designer active materials. The project will use particle-based simulations of model active glasses to construct a detailed phenomenology of their behaviour for a broad range of deformation scenarios including steady shear, shear startup and oscillatory shear. The insights from this will be condensed into a mesoscopic model that extends and builds on the very successful Soft Glassy Rheology (SGR) model, by incorporating essential biophysical ingredients and in particular the driving by active processes. This mesoscopic approach will allow scaling up to realistic system sizes and will identify the key parameters that need to be tuned in the design of new active materials. The insights gained on a wide range of systems from the cytoplasm and cellular aggregates to synthetic active matter will have a strong impact both on the academic and, in the medium term, non-academic sectors. They will reach across traditional boundaries to researchers in physics, biology and chemistry and strengthen an important interdisciplinary field within the European Research Area. The outreach opportunities provided by the fascinating behaviour of active glassy materials will be exploited with dedicated dissemination and communication activities targeted at a broad range of audiences.

Germany

2026-02-15