Related papers: Tight packing of a flexible rod in two-dimensional…
The continuous packing of a flexible rod in two-dimensional cavities yields a countable set of interacting domains that resembles non-equilibrium cellular systems and belongs to a new class of light-weight material. However, the link…
The packing problem of long thin filaments that are injected into confined spaces is of fundamental interest for physicists and biologists alike. How linear threads pack and coil is well known only for the ideal case of rigid containers,…
The injection of a long flexible rod into a two-dimensional domain yields a complex pattern commonly studied through elasticity theory, packing analysis, and fractal geometries. "Loop" is a one-vertex entity that is naturally formed in this…
Using Monte Carlo simulation, we analyse the behaviour of two-dimensional hard rods in four different types of geometric confinement: (i) a slit pore where the particles are confined between two parallel walls with homeotropic anchoring;…
Through extensive Monte Carlo simulations, we systematically study the effect of chain stiffness on the packing ability of linear polymers composed of hard spheres in extremely confined monolayers, corresponding effectively to 2D films.…
A variational framework is developed to examine the equilibrium states of a semi-flexible polymer that is constrained to lie on a fixed surface. As an application the confinement of a closed polymer loop of fixed length $2\pi R$ within a…
Random packings of stiff rods are self-supporting mechanical structures stabilized by long range interactions induced by contacts. To understand the geometrical and topological complexity of the packings, we first deploy X-ray computerized…
We investigate the morphologies and maximum packing density of thin wires packed into spherical cavities. Using simulations and experiments, we find that ordered as well as disordered structures emerge, depending on the amount of internal…
Confined thin structures are ubiquitous in nature. Spatial and length constraints have led to a number of novel packing strategies at both the micro-scale, as when DNA packages inside a capsid, and the macro-scale, seen in plant root…
Monte Carlo simulations are used to study the translocation of a polymer into a cavity. Modeling the polymer as a hard-sphere chain with a length up to N=601 monomers, we use a multiple-histogram method to measure the variation of the…
The packing of elastic bodies has emerged as a paradigm for the study of macroscopic disordered systems. However, progress is hampered by the lack of controlled experiments. Here we consider a model experiment for the isotropic…
We study the optimal packing of short, hard spherocylinders confined to lie tangential to a spherical surface, using simulated annealing and molecular dynamics simulations. For clusters of up to twelve particles, we map out the changes in…
Brownian motion and viscoelasticity of semiflexible polymers is a subject that has been studied for many years. Still, rigorous analysis has been hindered due to the difficulty in handling the constraint that polymer chains cannot be…
Charged rod-like polymers are not able to bind all their neutralizing counter-ions: a fraction of them evaporates while the others are said to be condensed. We study here counter-ion condensation and its ramifications, both numerically by…
When a single long piece of elastic wire is injected trough channels into a confining two-dimensional cavity, a complex structure of hierarchical loops is formed. In the limit of maximum packing density, these structures are described by…
A finite element program is presented to simulate the process of packing and coiling elastic wires in two- and three-dimensional confining cavities. The wire is represented by third order beam elements and embedded into a corotational…
We consider a dilute solution of infinitely rigid rods near a curved, perfectly repulsive surface and study the contribution of the rod depletion layer to the bending elastic constants of membranes. We find that a spontaneous curvature…
The subject of this work is the adsorption transition of a long flexible self-avoiding polymer chain onto a rigid thin rod. The rod is represented by a cylinder of radius R with a short-ranged attractive surface potential for the chain…
We introduce a simple theoretical model, the Freely Jointed Chain with quenched hinges (qFJC), which captures the quenched disorder in the local bending stiffness of the polymer. In this article, we analyze the tensile elasticity of the…
In this paper, we consider rods whose thickness vary linearly between $\eps$ and $\eps^2$. Our aim is to study the asymptotic behavior of these rods in the framework of the linear elasticity. We use a decomposition method of the…