Hyperdisordered cell packing on a growing surface

TL;DR

This study investigates how pigment cells pack on a growing surface, revealing hyperdisordered arrangements that resemble critical systems, modeled by randomly inserting hard disks on an expanding surface, with implications for various growing dense systems.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of hyperdisordered packing on expanding surfaces and models this behavior with a novel random insertion approach, advancing understanding of packing in growing domains.

Findings

Relative density fluctuations grow with scale in cell packing.

Chromatophore size increases but size distribution remains stationary.

Model reproduces hyperdisordered scaling observed in biological data.

Abstract

While the physics of disordered packing in non-growing systems is well understood, unexplored phenomena can emerge when packing takes place in growing domains. We study the arrangements of pigment cells (chromatophores) on squid skin as a biological example of a packed system on an expanding surface. We find that relative density fluctuations in cell numbers grow with spatial scale. We term this behavior ``hyperdisordered'', in contrast with hyperuniform behavior in which relative fluctuations tend to zero at large scale. We find that hyperdisordered scaling, akin to that of a critical system, is quantitatively reproduced by a model in which hard disks are randomly inserted in a homogeneously growing surface. In addition, we find that chromatophores increase in size during animal development, but maintain a stationary size distribution. The physical mechanisms described in our work may apply to a broad class of growing dense systems.