Related papers: Structural Transitions and Soft Modes in Frustrate…
Elucidating the interplay of stress and geometry is a fundamental scientific question arising in multiple fields. In this work, we investigate the geometric frustration of crystalline caps confined on the sphere in both elastic and plastic…
A detailed description of the conformational plasticity of double stranded DNA (ds) is a necessary framework for understanding protein-DNA interactions. Until now, however structure and kinetics of the transition from the basic conformation…
We study excitations in weakly interacting pairs of quantum spin ladders coupled through geometrically frustrated bonds. The ground state is a disordered spin liquid, that at high fields is replaced by an ordered chiral helimagnetic phase.…
We study the geometrical frustration of extended Hubbard model on diamond chain, where vertical lines correspond to the hopping and repulsive Coulomb interaction terms between sites, while the rest of them represent only the Coulomb…
Peritrichous bacteria swim in viscous fluids by rotating multiple helical flagellar filaments. As the bacterium swims forward, all its flagella rotate in synchrony behind the cell in a helical bundle. When the bacterium changes its…
We investigate the emergence of chiral meso-structures in one-dimensional fluids consisting of stacked discotic particles and demonstrate that helical undulations are generated spontaneously from internal elastic stresses. The stability of…
Observed under the polarizing microscope, the B7bis phase in the banana compound D14F3 [J.P. Bedel et al, Liq. Cryst., 27, 1411 (2000)] displays two types of textures of defects, namely (a): helical ribbons, that nucleate in large…
Using Density-Matrix Renormalization Group, we investigate the general phase diagram of the frustrated two-leg ladder with Heisenberg interactions along legs, rungs and diagonals. We confirm that all antiferromagnetic gapped states belong…
Many proteins interact with and deform double-stranded DNA in cells. Single-molecule experiments have studied the elasticity of DNA with helix-deforming proteins, including proteins that bend DNA. These experiments increase the need for…
We develop a continuum elastic approach to examining the bending mechanics of semiflexible filaments with a local internal degree of freedom that couples to the bending modulus. We apply this model to study the nonlinear mechanics of a…
We study experimentally what is arguably the simplest yet non-trivial colloidal system: two-dimensional clusters of 6 spherical particles bound by depletion interactions. These clusters have multiple, degenerate ground states whose…
To obtain the probability distribution of 2D crack patterns in mesoscopic regions of a disordered solid, the formalism of Paper I requires that a functional form associating the crack patterns (or states) to their formation energy be…
Geometric frustration leads to complex phases of matter with exotic properties. Antiferromagnets on triangular lattices and square ice are two simple models of geometrical frustration. We map their highly degenerated ground-state phase…
Recent technological advances in controlling materials have developed methods to produce idealized two-dimensional (2D) electron systems such as heterogeneous interfaces, molecular-beam-epitaxy (MBE) grown atomic layers, exfoliated thin…
The thermodynamic properties of DNA circular molecules are investigated by a new path integral computational method which treats in the real space the fundamental forces stabilizing the molecule. The base pair and stacking contributions to…
We examine the crystallization dynamics of nanoparticles reversibly tethered by DNA hybridization. We show that the crystallization happens readily only in a narrow temperature "slot," and always proceeds via a two-step process, mediated by…
We study the impact of the diagonal frustrating couplings on the quantum phase diagram of a two-leg ladder composed of alternating spin-1 and spin-1/2 rungs. As the coupling strength is increased the system successively exhibits two gapped…
We report on recent results for strongly frustrated quantum $J_1$-$J_2$ antiferromagnets in dimensionality d=1,2,3 obtained by the coupled cluster method (CCM). We demonstrate that the CCM in high orders of approximation allows us to…
We report experimental evidence of a Gardner-like transition from variable to persistent force contacts in a two-dimensional, bidisperse granular crystal by analyzing the variability of both particle positions and force networks formed…
Frustrated quantum magnets may exhibit fascinating collective phenomena. The main goal of this dissertation is to provide conclusive evidence for the emergence of novel phases of matter like quantum spin liquids in local quantum spin…