Two-dimensional melting of deformable particles in a model biological tissue

by Massimo Pica Ciamarra (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Tuesday 3 Jul 2018, 10:00 → 11:00 Europe/Rome

Aula 5 (Dipartimento di Fisica - Ed. E.Fermi)

Biological cells and polymeric particles such as star polymers, dendrimers and microgels change volume and shape when compressed by their neighbors at high density. In this regime the energy of a particle depends on its shape, which is fixed by its close neighbors. Accordingly, particles interact via a many-body potential and the usual coarse-graining strategies leading to the introduction of an effective two-body potential fails. In this talk I will present an alternative coarse-graining approach based on the Voronoi model, as applied to the investigation of the two-dimensional melting of confluent tissues.