Related papers: The Geometry of Ciliary Dynamics
In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…
In comparative and developmental neuroanatomy one encounters questions regarding the deformation of neural tissue under stress. The motivation of this note is an observation (Barbas {\it et al}) that at cortical folds or gyri, the layers of…
Grain rotation and grain boundary (GB) sliding are two important mechanisms for grain coarsening and plastic deformation in nanocrystalline materials. They are in general coupled with GB migration and the resulting dynamics, driven by…
Animal cells in tissues are supported by biopolymer matrices, which typically exhibit highly nonlinear mechanical properties. While the linear elasticity of the matrix can significantly impact cell mechanics and functionality, it remains…
We use continuum theory to show that chirality is a key thermodynamic control parameter for the aggregation of biopolymers: chirality produces a stable disperse phase of hexagonal bundles under moderately poor solvent conditions, as has…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Tendrils coil their shape to anchor the plant to supporting structures, allowing vertical growth toward light. Although climbing plants have been studied for a long time, extracting information regarding the relationship between the…
Skeletal muscles are living tissues that can undergo large deformations in short periods of time and that can be activated to produce force. In this paper we use the principles of continuum mechanics to propose a dynamic, fully non-linear,…
A 3D pendulum consists of a rigid body, supported at a fixed pivot, with three rotational degrees of freedom. The pendulum is acted on by a gravitational force. Symmetry assumptions are shown to lead to the planar 1D pendulum and to the…
Colloidal membranes, self assembled monolayers of aligned rod like molecules, offer a template for designing membranes with definite shapes and curvature, and possibly new functionalities in the future. Often the constituent rods, due to…
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
The original models of causal dynamical triangulations construct space-time by arranging a set of simplices in layers separated by a fixed time-like distance. The importance of the foliation structure in the 2+1 dimensional model is studied…
Motivated to understand the behavior of biological filaments interacting with membranes of various types, we study a theoretical model for the shape and thermodynamics of intrinsically-helical filaments bound to curved membranes. We show…
Adhesive cell-substrate interactions are crucial for cell motility and are responsible for the necessary traction that propels cells. These interactions can also change the shape of the cell, analogous to liquid droplet wetting on adhesive…
Curvature and mechanics are intimately connected for thin materials, and this coupling between geometry and physical properties is readily seen in folded structures from intestinal villi and pollen grains, to wrinkled membranes and…
The dynamics of filaments in flow are central to understanding a wide range of biological and soft-matter systems, yet their behavior under time-dependent forcing remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate the long-time dynamics of…
Eukaryotic swimming cells such as spermatozoa, algae or protozoa use flagella or cilia to move in viscous fluids. The motion of their flexible appendages in the surrounding fluid induces propulsive forces that balance with the viscous drag…
We examine the budding of a nanoscale particle through a lipid bilayer using molecular dynamics simulations, free energy calculations, and an elastic theory, with the aim of determining the extent to which equilibrium elasticity theory can…
Biofilament-motor protein complexes are ubiquitous in biology and drive the transport of cargo vital for many fundamental cellular processes. As they move, motor proteins exert compressive forces on the filaments to which they are attached,…
We study a simple two-dimensional model for motion of an elastic filament subject to internally generated stresses and show that wave-like propagating shapes which can propel the filament can be induced by a self-organized mechanism via a…