2020/02/29 by Debarghya Banerjee, Vincenzo Vitelli, Frank Jülicher +1
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.126.138001
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 138001 (2021) · 6 pages, 3 figures
arxiv created 2021/03/30 · arxiv updated 2021/03/31
The mechanical response of active media ranging from biological gels to living tissues is governed by a subtle interplay between viscosity and elasticity. In this Letter, we generalize the canonical Kelvin-Voigt and Maxwell models to active viscoelastic media that break both parity and time-reversal symmetries. The resulting continuum theories exhibit viscous and elastic tensors that are both antisymmetric, or odd, under exchange of pairs of indices. We analyze how these parity violating viscoelastic coefficients determine the relaxation mechanisms and wave-propagation properties of odd materials.