Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ghaznavi, Adil, Rossi, Saverio, Zamponi, Francesco, Manning, M. Lisa
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03252
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909941578596352
author Ghaznavi, Adil
Rossi, Saverio
Zamponi, Francesco
Manning, M. Lisa
author_facet Ghaznavi, Adil
Rossi, Saverio
Zamponi, Francesco
Manning, M. Lisa
contents High-density granular active matter is a useful model for dense animal collectives and could be useful for designing reconfigurable materials that can flow or solidify on command. Recent work has demonstrated key similarities and differences between the mechanical response of dense active matter and its sheared passive counterpart, yet a constitutive law that predicts precisely how dense active matter flows or fails remains elusive. Here we study the yielding transition in dense active matter in the limit of slow driving and large persistence times, across a wide range of material preparations. Under shear, materials prepared to be very low energy or ultrastable are brittle, and well-described by elastoplastic constitutive laws. We show that under random active forcing, however, ultrastable materials are always ductile. We develop a modified elastoplastic model that captures and explains these observations, where the key parameter is the correlation length of the input active driving field. We also observe large parameter regimes where the plastic flow is surprisingly well-predicted by the input active driving field and not highly dependent on the structural disorder, suggesting new strategies for control.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_03252
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Yielding in dense active matter
Ghaznavi, Adil
Rossi, Saverio
Zamponi, Francesco
Manning, M. Lisa
Soft Condensed Matter
High-density granular active matter is a useful model for dense animal collectives and could be useful for designing reconfigurable materials that can flow or solidify on command. Recent work has demonstrated key similarities and differences between the mechanical response of dense active matter and its sheared passive counterpart, yet a constitutive law that predicts precisely how dense active matter flows or fails remains elusive. Here we study the yielding transition in dense active matter in the limit of slow driving and large persistence times, across a wide range of material preparations. Under shear, materials prepared to be very low energy or ultrastable are brittle, and well-described by elastoplastic constitutive laws. We show that under random active forcing, however, ultrastable materials are always ductile. We develop a modified elastoplastic model that captures and explains these observations, where the key parameter is the correlation length of the input active driving field. We also observe large parameter regimes where the plastic flow is surprisingly well-predicted by the input active driving field and not highly dependent on the structural disorder, suggesting new strategies for control.
title Yielding in dense active matter
topic Soft Condensed Matter
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03252