Physics: Publication in Nature Communications

Physicists from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) have, in collaboration with colleagues from Darmstadt and Dresden, examined the movement in clusters of active, self-propelled, flexible polymer chains. In the process, they identified new physical laws, with which they also can describe living clusters of worms and tentacles. In the journal Nature Communications, they describe that the active movement of living individuals causes novel internal entanglements to arise, which can stiffen such a dynamic cluster to the extent that it practically becomes a solid.