Sensitive particle shape dependence of growth-induced mesoscale nematic structure

TL;DR

This study explores how subtle variations in particle shape influence the formation, stability, and size distribution of nematic microdomains in proliferating particle systems, revealing mechanisms underlying self-organization.

Contribution

It demonstrates that minor shape modifications significantly affect mesoscale nematic structures and introduces an effective model linking microdomain breakup mechanisms to size distributions.

Findings

Shape variations alter microdomain formation patterns

Transition from exponential to scale-free size distributions observed

Effective model explains differences in microdomain breakup mechanisms

Abstract

Directed growth, anisotropic cell shapes, and confinement drive self-organization in multicellular systems. We investigate the influence of particle shape on the distribution and dynamics of nematic microdomains in a minimal in-silico model of proliferating, sterically interacting particles, akin to colonies of rod-shaped bacteria. By introducing continuously tuneable tip variations around a common rod shape with spherical caps, we find that subtle changes significantly impact the emergent dynamics, leading to distinct patterns of microdomain formation and stability. Our analysis reveals separate effects of particle shape and aspect ratio, as well as a transition from exponential to scale-free size distributions, which we recapitulate using an effective master equation model. This allows us to relate differences in microdomain size distributions to different physical mechanisms of microdomain breakup. Our results thereby contribute to the characterization of the effective dynamics in growing aggregates at large and intermediate length scales and the microscopic properties that control it. This could be relevant both for biological self-organization and design strategies for future artificial systems.