Related papers: Botanical Ratchets
Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through…
The rheological properties of brushes of different length on the surface of human epithelial cancerous cells are studied here by means of coarse grained numerical simulations, where the surface of the cell is subjected to an external…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
Spatial systems with heterogeneities are ubiquitous in nature, from precipitation, temperature and soil gradients controlling vegetation growth to morphogen gradients controlling gene expression in embryos. Such systems, generally described…
In the presence of extended defects, familiar incoming particles can scatter into exotic outgoing states created by twist operators. We show that one possible mechanism driving these "categorical scattering" processes is the presence of…
Brownian dynamics of Dirac fermions in twisted bilayer graphene is investigated within the framework of semiclassical relativistic Langevin equations. We find that under the influence of orthogonal, commensurate ac drives in the periodic…
Mechanical signaling plays a key role in biological processes like embryo development and cancer growth. One prominent way to probe mechanical properties of tissues is to study their response to externally applied forces. Using a…
We propose a mechanism to explain what occurs when a mixture of grains of different sizes and different shapes (i.e. different repose angles) is poured into a quasi-two-dimensional cell. Specifically, we develop a model that displays…
Random walks on multidimensional nonlinear landscapes are of interest in many areas of science and engineering. In particular, properties of adaptive trajectories on fitness landscapes determine population fates and thus play a central role…
Search processes in the natural world are often punctuated by home returns that reset the position of foraging animals, birds, and insects. Many theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies have now demonstrated that this strategy can…
Transport phenomena in spatially periodic systems far from thermal equilibrium are considered. The main emphasize is put on directed transport in so-called Brownian motors (ratchets), i.e. a dissipative dynamics in the presence of thermal…
Many organisms exhibit branching morphologies that twist around each other and become entangled. Entanglement occurs when different objects interlock, creating complex and often irreversible configurations. This physical phenomenon is…
We study a one-dimensional mixture of active (run-and-tumble) particles and passive (Brownian) particles, with single-file constraint, in a sawtooth potential. The active particles experience a ratchet effect: this generates a current,…
Viewed under a fluorescence microscope, the actomyosin cytoskeleton presents vivid streaks of lines together with persistent oscillatory waves. Using an active hydrodynamic approach, we show how a uniform distribution of single or mixture…
The growth of actin filament networks is a fundamental biological process that drives a variety of cellular and intracellular motions. During motility, eukaryotic cells and intracellular pathogens are propelled by actin networks organized…
Complex networks characterized by global transport processes rely on the presence of directed paths from input to output nodes and edges, which organize in characteristic linked components. The analysis of such network-spanning structures…
We study a spatial branching model, where the underlying motion is Brownian motion and the branching is affected by a random collection of reproduction blocking sets called "mild" obstacles. We show that the quenched local growth rate is…
Two-dimensional networks of ordered quantum dots beyond the percolation threshold are studied, as typical example of conducting nanostructures with quenched random disorder. Theory predicts anomalous diffusion with stretched-exponential…
We consider branching particle processes on discrete structures like the hypercube in a random fitness landscape (i.e., random branching/killing rates). The main question is about the location where the main part of the population sits at a…
Animals and robots must self-right on the ground after overturning. Biology research described various strategies and motor patterns in many species. Robotics research devised many strategies. However, we do not well understand how the…