News
From filament pick-up sticks to active foams
20 Aug 2024
LMU physicists have developed a new model that describes how filaments assemble into active foams.
Many fundamental processes of life, and their synthetic counterparts in nanotechnology, are based on the autonomous assembly of individual particles into complex patterns. LMU physicist Professor Erwin Frey, Chair of Statistical and Biological Physics at LMU Munich and member of the ORIGINS Excellence Cluster, investigates the fundamental principles of this self-organization. With his team, he has now developed a theoretical model which explains the formation of patterns such as active foams from a mixture of protein filaments and molecular motors. The researchers have reported on their findings in the journal Physical Review X.