Related papers: Discrete elastic model for stretching-induced flag…
The critical buckling characteristics of hydrostatically pressurized complete spherical shells filled with an elastic medium are demonstrated. A model based on small deflection thin shell theory, the equations of which are solved in…
Motivated by the intriguing motility of spirochetes (helically-shaped bacteria that screw through viscous fluids due to the action of internal periplasmic flagella), we examine the fundamental fluid dynamics of superhelices translating and…
Biological filaments such as DNA or bacterial flagella are typically curved in their natural states. To elucidate the interplay of viscous drag, twisting, and bending in the overdamped dynamics of such filaments, we compute the steady-state…
We study the stress response to a step strain of covalently bonded gelatin gels in the temperature range where triple helix reversible crosslink formation is prohibited. We observe slow stress relaxation towards a $T$-dependent finite…
We study the liquid crystalline phase behavior of a concentrated suspension of helical flagella isolated from {\it Salmonella typhimurium}. Flagella are prepared with different polymorphic states, some of which have a pronounced helical…
The twisting and writhing of a cell body and associated mechanical stresses is an underappreciated constraint on microbial self-propulsion. Multi-flagellated bacteria can even buckle and writhe under their own activity as they swim through…
We study the uniaxial compressive behavior of disordered colloidal free-standing micropillars composed of a bidisperse mixture of 3 and 6 um polystyrene particles. Mechanical annealing of confined pillars enables variation of the packing…
We study the onset of spontaneous dynamics in the follower force model of an active filament, wherein a slender elastic filament in a viscous liquid is clamped normal to a wall at one end and subjected to a tangential compressive force at…
Scanning tunneling microscopy experiments have revealed an spontaneous rippled-to-buckled transition in heated graphene sheets, in absence of any mechanical load. Several models relying on a simplified picture of the interaction between…
We present a mathematical model of lophotrichous bacteria, motivated by Pseudomonas putida, which swim through fluid by rotating a cluster of multiple flagella extended from near one pole of the cell body. Although the flagella rotate…
We study the mechanics of a reversible decohesion (unzipping) of an elastic layer subjected to quasi-static end-point loading. At the micro level the system is simulated by an elastic chain of particles interacting with a rigid foundation…
We study the non-monotonic force-extension behaviour of helical ribbons using a new model for inextensible elastic strips. Unlike previous rod models our model predicts hysteresis behaviour for low-pitch ribbons of arbitrary material…
The tight-binding model is closely associated with the modified layer-based random-phase approximation to thoroughly investigate the electron-electron interactions in sliding bilayer graphene. The Coulomb interactions and intralayer and…
The occurrence of coiled or helical morphologies is common in nature, from plant roots to DNA packaging into viral capsids, as well as in applications such as oil drilling processes. In many examples, chiral structures result from the…
Any macroscopic deformation of a filamentous bundle is necessarily accompanied by local sliding and/or stretching of the constituent filaments. Yet the nature of the sliding friction between two aligned filaments interacting through…
We study the motion of elastic networks driven over a random substrate. Our model which includes local friction forces leads to complex dynamical behavior. We find a transition to a sliding state which belongs to a new universality class.…
We carried out dynamic force manipulations $in$ $silico$ on a variety of superhelical protein fragments from myosin, chemotaxis receptor, vimentin, fibrin, and phenylalanine zippers that vary in size and topology of their $\alpha$-helical…
We propose a framework to model elastic properties of polycrystals by coupling crystal orientational degrees of freedom with elastic strains. Our model encodes crystal symmetries and takes into account explicitly the strain compatibility…
Physico-mechanical properties of polymers in solid state, in particular conditions of their structural transformations, are substantially defined by existence and mobility of elementary nonlinear excitations. The localized oscillatory…
The structure of random sphere packings in mechanical equilibrium in prescribed stress states, as studied by molecular dynamics simulations, strongly depends on the assembling procedure. Frictionless packings in the limit of low pressure…