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Cells contain elaborate and interconnected networks of protein polymers which make up the cytoskeleton. The cytoskeleton governs the internal positioning and movement of vesicles and organelles, and controls dynamic changes in cell…
Anomalous Hall crystals (AHCs) are exotic phases of matter that simultaneously break continuous translation symmetry and exhibit the quantum anomalous Hall effect. AHCs have recently been proposed to explain the observation of an integer…
Dispersed colloidal particles within a suspension can aggregate and spontaneously self-organize into a robust, percolating structure known as a gel. These network-like structures are prevalent in nature and play a critical role in many…
We study elasticity-driven morphological transitions of soft spherical core shell structures in which the core can be treated as an isotropic elastic continuum and the surface or shell as a tensionless liquid layer, whose elastic response…
We study the equilibrium configuration of a nematic liquid crystal bounded by a rough surface. The wrinkling of the surface induces a partial melting in the degree of orientation. This softened region penetrates the bulk up to a length…
Molecular chirality leads to a wonderful variety of equilibrium structures, from the simple cholesteric phase to the twist-grain-boundary phases, and it is responsible for interesting and technologically important materials like…
We consider helical configurations of a cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) sandwiched between two substrates with homogeneous director orientation favored at both confining plates. We study the CLC twist wavenumber $q$ characterizing the…
Growth-induced instabilities are ubiquitous in biological systems and lead to diverse morphologies in the form of wrinkling, folding, and creasing. The current work focusses on the mechanics behind growth-induced wrinkling instabilities in…
How thousands of microtubules and molecular motors self-organize into spindles remains poorly understood. By combining static, nanometer-resolution, large-scale electron tomography reconstructions and dynamic, optical-resolution, polarized…
Asymmetries and anisotropies are widespread in biological systems, including in the structure and dynamics of cilia and eukaryotic flagella. These microscopic, hair-like appendages exhibit asymmetric beating patterns that break…
We study the pattern formation of chiral charges in the presence of reactions. We show that, in contrast to the original Turing's mechanism of pattern formation in diffusion-reaction systems, the interplay between chiral effects and…
The spiral is one of Nature's more ubiquitous shape: it can be seen in various media, from galactic geometry to cardiac tissue. In the literature, very specific models are used to explain some of the observed incarnations of these dynamic…
Stress fibers are contractile actomyosin bundles commonly observed in the cytoskeleton of metazoan cells. The spatial profile of the polarity of actin filaments inside contractile actomyosin bundles is either monotonic (graded) or periodic…
From the mitotic spindle up to tissues and biofilms, many biological systems behave as active droplets, which often break symmetry and change shape spontaneously. Here, I show that active nematic droplets can experience a fingering…
While actin bundles are used by living cells for structural fortification, the microscopic origin of the elasticity of bundled networks is not understood. Here, we show that above a critical concentration of the actin binding protein…
We study equilibrium configurations of non-Euclidean plates, in which the reference metric is uniaxially periodic. This work is motivated by recent experiments on thin sheets of composite thermally responsive gels [1]. Such sheets bend…
Intracellular protein patterns regulate a variety of vital cellular processes such as cell division and motility, which often involve dynamic changes of cell shape. These changes in cell shape may in turn affect the dynamics of…
Formation of turbulence of capillary waves is studied in laboratory experiments. The spectra show multiple exponentially decreasing harmonics of the parametrically excited wave which nonlinearly broaden with the increase in forcing.…
Active nematic models explain the topological defects and flow patterns observed in epithelial tissues, but the nature of active stress-whether it is extensile or contractile, a key parameter of the theory-is not well established…
The buckling of elastic bodies is a common phenomenon in the mechanics of solids. Wrinkling of membranes can often be interpreted as buckling under constraints that prohibit large amplitude deformation. We present a combination of analytic…