Related papers: Statics and Dynamics of the Wormlike Bundle Model
A generalized theory of the self-limiting assembly of twisted bundles of filaments and columns is presented. Bundles and fibers form in a broad variety of supramolecular systems, from biological to synthetic materials. A widely-invoked…
Aggregation of like-charged polymers is widely observed in biological and soft matter systems. In many systems, bundles are formed when a short-range attraction of diverse physical origin like charge-bridging, hydrogen-bonding or…
We study the buckling of an idealized, semiflexible filament along whose contour magnetic moments are placed. {We give analytic expressions for the critical stiffness of the filament below which it buckles due to the magnetic compression.…
The tube model is a central concept in polymer physics, and allows to reduce the complex many-filament problem of an entangled polymer solution to a single filament description. We investigate the probability distribution function of…
We study the elasticity of fibrous materials composed of generalized stiff polymers. It is shown that in contrast to cellular foam-like structures affine strain fields are generically unstable. Instead, a subtle interplay between the…
We consider an explicit model of a semiflexible filament moving in two dimensions on a gliding assay of motor proteins, which attach to and detach from filament segments stochastically, with a detachment rate that depends on the local load…
Microtubules, the primary components of the chromosome segregation machinery, are stabilized by longitudinal and lateral non-covalent bonds between the tubulin subunits. However, the thermodynamics of these bonds and the microtubule…
Mechanically bonded membranes of interlocked ring polymers are a significant generalization of conventional elastic sheets, where connectivity is provided by covalent bonding, and represent a promising class of topological meta-materials.…
The fiber bundle model describes a collection of elastic fibers under load. the fibers fail successively and for each failure, the load distribution among the surviving fibers change. Even though very simple, the model captures the…
The presented investigation is motivated by the need to uncover connections between underlying rotor fluid-structure interactions and vortex dynamics to fatigue performance and characterization of flexible rotor blades, their hub, and their…
Certain bacteria form filamentous colonies when the cells fail to separate after dividing. In Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus thermus, and cyanobacteria, the filaments can wrap into complex supercoiled structures as the cells grow. The…
In this fluid dynamics video we explore an array of different possible dynamics for a flexible filament sedimenting in a viscous fluid. The time-dependent shapes and trajectories of the filament are determined analytically and numerically…
The morphological dynamics, instabilities and transitions of elastic filaments in viscous flows underlie a wealth of biophysical processes from flagellar propulsion to intracellular streaming, and are also key to deciphering the rheological…
We study the aggregation transition of a finite theta-polymer system in dependence on the bending stiffness $\kappa$ with the help of parallel multicanonical simulations. In order to distinguish amorphous aggregates from polymer bundles we…
High-density carbon nanotube networks (CNNs) continue to attract interest as active elements in nanoelectronic devices, nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) and multifunctional nanocomposites. The interplay between the network nanostructure…
We propose a physical model for the nonlinear inelastic mechanics of sticky biopolymer networks with potential applications to inelastic cell mechanics. It consists in a minimal extension of the glassy wormlike chain (GWLC) model, which has…
We study the segregation of motile semiflexible filaments from a background of similar but non-motile filaments. Our Langevin dynamics simulations reveal a wide range of emergent structures governed by filament flexibility and activity,…
We investigate theoretically the effect of polymer tension on the collective behavior of reversibly binding cross-links. For this purpose, we employ a model of two weakly bending wormlike chains aligned in parallel by a tensile force, with…
Semiflexible polymer models are widely used as a paradigm to understand structural phases in biomolecules including folding of proteins. Since stable knots are not so common in real proteins, the existence of stable knots in semiflexible…
It has become clear in recent years that the simple uniform wormlike chain model needs to be modified in order to account for more complex behavior which has been observed experimentally in some important biopolymers. For example, the large…