Metasoft 2025 - Statistical mechanics of collective actuation

Porteur du projet : Michel Fruchart and Thomas Risler

Schools involved : ESPCI Paris - PSL and Institut Curie

Project summary :

In biological tissues, shape and collective functionalities emerge from individual energy-transducing units, biological cells. To engineer materials with life-like properties, it is necessary to reproduce the ability of biological system to coordinate individual units towards a coherent goal. While an understanding of active liquids has been consolidated in the last decades, less is known about active solids. Recently, a phenomenon dubbed collective actuation in which large-scale mechanical oscillations arising from microscopic energy injection has been identified in programmable robotic metamaterials and reported in biological systems including epithelial layers and bacterial rafts. The goal of this proposal to develop a unified understanding of collective actuation from the perspective of non-equilibrium statistical physics and nonlinear physics. Our results will pave the road towards programming morphogenetic motion in bio-inspired soft metamaterials through the selective actuation of mechanical modes.