Universal Features of Metastable State Energies in Cellular Matter

Mechanical equilibrium states of cellular matter are overwhelmingly metastable and separated from each other by topology changes. Using theory and simulations, it is shown that for a wide class of energy functionals in 2D, including those describing tissue cell layers, local energy differences between neighboring metastable states as well as global energy differences between initial states and ground states are governed by simple, universal relations. Knowledge of instantaneous length of an edge undergoing a T1 transition is sufficient to predict local energy changes, while the initial edge length distribution yields a successful prediction for the global energy difference. An analytical understanding of the model parameters is provided.