Related papers: Phenomenological and microscopic theories for catc…
We study the dynamics of MEMS microbeams undergoing electrostatic pull-in. At DC voltages close to the pull-in voltage, experiments and numerical simulations have reported `bottleneck' behaviour in which the transient dynamics slow down…
Pattern formation often occurs in confined systems, yet how boundaries shape patterning dynamics is unclear. We develop techniques to analyze confinement effects in nonlocal advection-diffusion equations, which generically capture the…
We investigate a continuum mechanical model for an adherent cell on two dimensional adhesive micropatterned substrates. The cell is modeled as an isotropic and homogeneous elastic material subject to uniform internal contractile stresses.…
The response to a knockout of a node is a characteristic feature of a networked dynamical system. Knockout resilience in the dynamics of the remaining nodes is a sign of robustness. Here we study the effect of knockouts for binary state…
We develop two new continuum contact models for coupled adhesion and friction, and discuss them in the context of existing models proposed in the literature. Our new models are able to describe sliding friction even under tensile normal…
Few-body physics has played a prominent role in atomic, molecular and nuclear physics since the early days of quantum mechanics. It is now possible---thanks to tremendous progress in cooling, trapping, and manipulating ultracold…
In various cellular processes, biofilaments like F-actin and F-tubulin are able to exploit chemical energy associated to polymerization to perform mechanical work against an external load. The force-velocity relationship quantitatively…
We address the controversial hot question concerning the validity of the loose coupling versus the lever-arm theories in the actomyosin dynamics by re-interpreting and extending the phenomenological washboard potential model proposed by…
Dynamical frictional phenomena are studied theoretically in a two-chain model with incommensurate structure. A perturbation theory with respect to the interchain interaction reveals the contributions from phonons excited in each chain to…
In Bhattacharya et al. (Science Advances, 2020), a set of chemical reactions involved in the dynamics of actin waves in cells was studied. Both at the microscopic level, where the individual chemical reactions are directly modelled using…
Biological systems encode function not primarily in steady states, but in the structure of transient responses elicited by time-varying stimuli. Overshoots, biphasic dynamics, adaptation kinetics, fold-change detection, entrainment, and…
Simple elastic models of spin-crossover compounds are known empirically to exhibit classical critical behavior. We demonstrate how the long-ranged interactions responsible for this behavior arise naturally upon integrating out mechanical…
Kinetics of collision-sticking processes between vapor molecules and molecular clusters of low volatile compounds facilitates the initial steps of atmospheric clustering. Conventional theoretical models are quite inaccurate due to the…
An analytical model based on variational principles for a thin-walled stiffened plate subjected to axial compression is presented. A system of nonlinear differential and integral equations is derived and solved using numerical continuation.…
We investigate the growth of a branched actin network under load. Using a combination of simulations and theory, we show that the network adapts to the load and exhibits two regimes: a finite velocity at low stress, followed by a power-law…
Power-law dwell times have been observed for molecular motors in living cells, but the origins of these trapped states are not known. We introduce a minimal model of motors moving on a two-dimensional network of filaments, and simulations…
Bistability is a major mechanism for cellular decision making and usually results from positive feedback in biochemical control systems. Here we show theoretically that bistability between unbound and bound states of adhesion clusters…
While all the information required for the folding of a protein is contained in its amino acid sequence, one has not yet learned how to extract this information to predict the three--dimensional, biologically active, native conformation of…
While fields like Artificial Life have made huge strides in quantifying the mechanisms that distinguish living systems from non-living ones, particular mechanisms remain difficult to reproduce in silico. Known as open-endedness, we've been…
The sticking of a soft polystyrene colloidal particle to a planar glass plate was studied by a microrheological technique using an optical tweezer to trap the particle and a piezoelectric-stage to position the plate and to sinusoidally…