Rafael González Albaladejo

University Carlos III de Madrid | UC3M · Gregorio Millán Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Nanoscience and Industrial Mathematics

Cells crawl along substrates by exploiting the biochemically driven dynamics of their internal structure: actin filaments are constantly polymerized from solution and the resulting actin network is contracted by molecular motors. We describe these processes with a two-fluid poroviscous one-dimensional model. Importantly, when spreading on substrate...

Collective biological systems display power laws for macroscopic quantities and are fertile probing grounds for statistical physics. Besides power laws, natural insect swarms present strong scale-free correlations, suggesting closeness to phase transitions. Swarms exhibit imperfect dynamic scaling: their dynamical correlation functions collapse int...

Animal motion and flocking are ubiquitous nonequilibrium phenomena that are often studied within active matter. In examples such as insect swarms, macroscopic quantities exhibit power laws with measurable critical exponents and ideas from phase transitions and statistical mechanics have been explored to explain them. The widely used Vicsek model wi...

Collective biological systems display power laws for macroscopic quantities and are fertile probing grounds for statistical physics. Besides power laws, natural insect swarms present strong scale-free correlations, suggesting closeness to phase transitions. Swarms exhibit $imperfect$ dynamic scaling: their dynamical correlation functions collapse i...

The harmonically confined Vicsek model displays qualitative and quantitative features observed in natural insect swarms. It exhibits a scale-free transition between single and multicluster chaotic phases. Finite-size scaling indicates that this unusual phase transition occurs at zero confinement [Phys. Rev. E 107, 014209 (2023)]. While the evidence...

The harmonically confined Vicsek model displays qualitative and quantitative features observed in natural insect swarms. It exhibits a scale free transition between single and multicluster chaotic phases. Finite size scaling indicates that this unusual phase transition occurs at zero confinement [Physical Review E 107, 014209 (2023)]. While the evi...

The Vicsek model encompasses the paradigm of active dry matter. Motivated by collective behavior of insects in swarms, we have studied finite-size effects and criticality in the three-dimensional, harmonically confined Vicsek model. We have discovered a phase transition that exists for appropriate noise and small confinement strength. On the critic...

The Vicsek model encompasses the paradigm of active dry matter. Motivated by collective behavior of insects in swarms, we have studied finite size effects and criticality in the three dimensional, harmonically confined Vicsek model. We have discovered a phase transition that exists for appropriate noise and small confinement strength. On the critic...

Swarms are examples of collective behavior of insects, which are singular among manifestations of flocking. Swarms possess strong correlations but no global order and exhibit finite-size scaling with a dynamic critical exponent $z \approx 1$. We have discovered a phase transition of the three-dimensional harmonically confined Vicsek model that exis...

We propose an immerse boundary approach for the dynamics of active contours in flows. When the active contours represent bacterial boundaries, we couple this system with dynamic energy budget models of cell metabolism for the evolution of the cell boundaries, informed by reaction-diffusion systems for the relevant concentration fields. Numerical si...

We propose a computational model to study the growth and spread of bacterial biofilms on interfaces, as well as the action of antibiotics on them. Bacterial membranes are represented by boundaries immersed in a fluid matrix and subject to interaction forces. Growth, division and death of bacterial cells follow dynamic energy budget rules, in respon...

We propose a computational framework to study the growth and spread of bacterial biofilms on interfaces, as well as the action of antibiotics on them. Bacterial membranes are represented by boundaries immersed in a fluid matrix and subject to interaction forces. Growth, division and death of bacterial cells follow dynamic energy budget rules, in re...