Related papers: Effective medium approach for stiff polymer networ…
Biological cells embedded in fibrous matrices have been observed to form inter-cellular bands of dense and aligned fibers, through which they mechanically interact over long distances. Such matrix-mediated cellular interactions have been…
Vitrimers, an important subset of dynamically crosslinked polymer networks, have many technological applications for their excellent properties, and the ability to be re-processed through plastic flow above the so-called vitrification…
Recent studies in mammalian hearts show that left ventricular wall thickening is an important mechanism for systolic ejection and that during contraction the cardiac muscle develops significant stresses in the muscular cross-fiber…
Based on a Hamiltonian that incorporates the elastic coupling between a tracer and active particles, we derive a generalized Langevin model for the non-equilibrium mechanical response of active viscoelastic biomatter. Our model accounts for…
We computationally investigate the active transport of tangentially-driven polymers with varying degrees of flexibility and activity in two-dimensional square lattices of obstacles. Tight periodic confinement induces notable conformational…
Cells sense the geometry and stiffness of their adhesive environment by active contractility. For strong adhesion to flat substrates, two-dimensional contractile network models can be used to understand how force is distributed throughout…
The actin cytoskeleton in living cells generates forces in conjunction with myosin motor proteins to directly and indirectly drive essential cellular processes. The semiflexible filaments of the cytoskeleton can respond nonlinearly to the…
Transmission of forces in static granular materials are studied within the framework of the force network ensemble, by numerically evaluating the mechanical response of hexagonal packings of frictionless grains and rectangular packings of…
The linear viscoelastic response of single semiflexible polymer chains in the infinite-dilution limit is studied using Brownian dynamics simulations of coarse-grained bead-spring chains. The springs obey the FENE-Fraenkel force law, a…
Living tissues show an extraordinary adaptiveness to strain, which is crucial for their proper biological functioning. The physical origin of this mechanical behaviour has been widely investigated using reconstituted networks of collagen…
We develop a formalism to describe the equilibrium distributions for segments of confined branched networks consisting of stiff filaments. This is applicable to certain situations of cytoskeleton in cells, such as for example actin…
Polymer network models construct the constitutive relationships of a broader polymer network from the behavior of a single polymer chain (e.g. viscoelastic response to applied forces, applied electromagnetic fields, etc.). Network models…
We image semi-flexible polymer networks under shear at the micrometer scale. By tracking embedded probe particles, we determine the local strain field, and directly measure its uniformity, or degree of affineness, on scales of 2-100 micron.…
Internally generated active stresses drive soft materials into architectures inaccessible to thermal self-assembly. We use a microtubule-based active fluid to assemble and irreversibly restructure actin-fascin networks. Subsequently, we…
We present a unified theory for the longitudinal dynamic response of a stiff polymer in solution to various external perturbations (mechanical excitations, hydrodynamic flows, electrical fields, temperature quenches ...) that can be…
Deep neural networks, particularly those employing Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), are often perceived as complex, high-dimensional, non-linear systems. This complexity poses a significant challenge to understanding their internal learning…
Correlated structures are intimately connected to intriguing phenomena exhibited by a variety of disordered systems such as soft colloidal gels, bio-polymer networks and colloidal suspensions near a shear jamming transition. The universal…
It is discussed that the classical effective medium theory for the elastic properties of random heterogeneous materials is not congruous with the effective medium theory for the electrical conductivity. In particular, when describing the…
Collagen networks provide the main structural component of most tissues and represent an important ingredient for bio-mimetic materials for bio-medical applications. Here we study the mechanical properties of stiff collagen networks derived…
Vitrimers are a class of crosslinked polymer that are capable of undergoing bond exchange reactions, allowing structural reorganization while maintaining overall network integrity. Two key features that are particularly relevant when this…