Related papers: Allosteric Regulation by a Critical Membrane
Electrostatic forces play many important roles in molecular biology, but are hard to model due to the complicated interactions between biomolecules and the surrounding solvent, a fluid composed of water and dissolved ions. Continuum model…
Liquid crystals in two dimensions undergo a first-order isotropic-to-quasi-nematic transition, provided the particle interactions are sufficiently ``sharp and narrow''. This implies phase coexistence between isotropic and quasi-nematic…
We study the complexity of approximating the partition function of dense Ising models in the critical regime. Recent work of Chen, Chen, Yin, and Zhang (FOCS 2025) established fast mixing at criticality, and even beyond criticality in a…
We have studied the critical properties of the three-dimensional random anisotropy Heisenberg model by means of numerical simulations using the Parallel Tempering method. We have simulated the model with two different disorder…
Recent work has highlighted roles for thermodynamic phase behavior in diverse cellular processes. Proteins and nucleic acids can phase separate into three-dimensional liquid droplets in the cytoplasm and nucleus and the plasma membrane of…
It is well known that the similar universal behavior of infinite-size (bulk) systems of different nature requires the same basic conditions: space dimensionality; number components of order parameter; the type (short- or long-range) of the…
The Fluid Mosaic Model by Singer & Nicolson proposes that biological membranes consist of a fluid lipid layer into which integral proteins are embedded. The lipid membrane acts as a two-dimensional liquid in which the proteins can diffuse…
Properties of nanoparticles have been studied within the framework of Ising model and the method of random-field interactions: the average magnetic moment and position of critical points of the magnetic and the concentration phase…
Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a…
We consider two-dimensional metals near a Pomeranchuk instability which breaks 90$^\circ$ lattice rotation symmetry. Such metals realize strongly-coupled non-Fermi liquids with critical fluctuations of an Ising-nematic order. At low…
Plasma membrane tubes are ubiquitous in cellular membranes and in the membranes of intracellular organelles. They play crucial roles in trafficking, ion transport, and cellular motility. The formation of plasma membrane tubes can be due to…
Multivalent associative proteins with strong complementary interactions play a crucial role in phase separation of intracellular liquid condensates. We study the internal dynamics of such "bond-network" condensates comprised of two…
We consider the behaviour of a critical system in the presence of a gradient perturbation of the couplings. In the direction of the gradient an interface region separates the ordered phase from the disordered one. We develop a scaling…
Isospin effects of the critical phenomena were studied via Xe isotopes in the frame of lattice gas model. All the critical temperatures for four Xe isotopes are close to 5.5 MeV at the same freeze-out density of about 0.39 $\rho_0$. The…
Hypothesis:Diffusion in confinement is an important fundamental problem with significant implications for applications of supported liquid phases. However, resolving the spatially dependent diffusion coefficient, parallel and perpendicular…
In these lectures I discuss long-scale properties of fluctuating polymerized membranes in the presence of network anisotropy and random heterogeneities. Amazingly, even infinitesimal amount of these seemingly innocuous but physically…
The Ising model exhibits qualitatively different properties in hyperbolic space in comparison to its flat space counterpart. Due to the negative curvature, a finite fraction of the total number of spins reside at the boundary of a volume in…
The collective behaviour of statistical systems close to critical points is characterized by an extremely slow dynamics which, in the thermodynamic limit, eventually prevents them from relaxing to an equilibrium state after a change in the…
Critical behavior developed near a quantum phase transition, interesting in its own right, offers exciting opportunities to explore the universality of strongly-correlated systems near the ground state. Cold atoms in optical lattices, in…
Constancy of life vitally depends on the internalization of particles through biomembranes. Of particular interest, cellular uptake, including phagocytosis, receptor-mediated endocytosis, and membrane fusion, critically depends on the…