Active systems, such as the cytoskeleton and bacterial suspensions, provide their own energy and hence operate out of thermodynamic equilibrium. Continuum models describing active systems are closely related to those describing liquid crystal hydrodynamics, together with an additional ‘active’ stress term. We discuss how the behaviour of the active continuum models depends on model parameters, such as the strength of the activity and the liquid crystal tumbling parameter, and we compare our results to recent experiments on cytoskeletal gels.
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