Overcrowding drives the unjamming transition of gap-free monolayers

Abstract: Collective cell motility plays central roles in various biological phenomena such as inflammatory response, wound healing, cancer metastasis and embryogenesis. These are biological demonstrations of the unjamming transition. However, contradictory to the typical density-driven jamming processes in particulate assemblies, cellular systems often get unjammed in highly packed, sometimes overcrowding tissue environments. In this work, we report that overcrowding can unjam gap-free monolayers through increasing isotropic compression. The transition boundary is determined by the isotropic compression and the cell-cell adhesion. We explicitly construct the free energy landscape for the T1 topological transition during monolayer rearrangement, and find that it evolves from single-barrier shape to double-barrier shape upon completion of the unjamming process. Our analyses reveal that the overcrowding and adhesion induced unjamming transition reflects the mechanical yielding of the highly deformable monolayer, which differs from those caused by loosing up a packed particulate assembly.