Related papers: The Helical Superstructure of Intermediate Filamen…
Superconducting micro- and nanohelices are proposed for the first time. A theoretical investigation of the superconducting state in the helical coils at the micro- and nanoscale is performed within the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau…
Cuprate superconductors display robust in-plane electronic correlations but exceptionally fragile interlayer coherence. We suggest that even weak vertically correlated disorder (arising from interstitial-oxygen staging, twin boundaries,…
FeSe$_{1-x}$S$_{x}$ superconductors are commonly considered layered van der Waals materials with negligible inter-layer coupling. Here, using inelastic neutron scattering to study spin excitations in single-crystal samples, we reveal that…
Twisted bilayer systems host a wealth of emergent phenomena, such as flat-band superconductivity, ferromagnetism, and ferroelectricity, arising from moir\'e superlattices and unconventional interlayer coupling. Despite their central role,…
Peritrichous bacteria swim in viscous fluids by rotating multiple helical flagellar filaments. As the bacterium swims forward, all its flagella rotate in synchrony behind the cell in a helical bundle. When the bacterium changes its…
Motivated by diverse phenomena in cellular biophysics, including bacterial flagellar motion and DNA transcription and replication, we study the overdamped nonlinear dynamics of a rotationally forced filament with twist and bend elasticity.…
Packings of macroscopic granular chains capture some of the essential aspects of molecular polymer systems and have been suggested as a paradigm to understand the physics on a molecular scale. However, here we demonstrate that the…
Self-shaping of curved structures, especially those involving flexible thin layers, has attracted increasing attention because of their broad potential applications in e.g. nanoelectromechanical/micro-electromechanical systems (NEMS/MEMS),…
Thin elastic sheets and membranes are known to wrinkle when they are stretched -- the associated physics is highly non-linear. The mechanics of thin films that exhibit unusual behavior upon stretching, when they possess auxetic structure,…
Many cellular processes require a polarization axis which generally initially emerges as an inhomogeneous distribution of molecular markers in the cell. We present a simple analytical model of a general mechanism of cell polarization taking…
Chiral polymers are ubiquitous in nature and in the cellular context they are often found in association with membranes. Here we show that surface bound polymers with an intrinsic twist and anisotropic bending stiffness can exhibit a sharp…
Ferroelectric nematic phases are a new class of polar fluids in which spontaneous polarization is directly coupled to the orientational order, providing unique opportunities for creating self-organized materils with spatially modulated…
We present a study on buckling of colloidal particles, including experimental, theoretical and numerical developments. Oil-filled thin shells prepared by emulsion templating show buckling in mixtures of water and ethanol, due to dissolution…
The cytoskeleton is an inhomogeneous network of semi-flexible filaments, which are involved in a wide variety of active biological processes. Although the cytoskeletal filaments can be very stiff and embedded in a dense and cross-linked…
In many composites the electrical transport takes place only by tunneling between isolated particles. For a long time it was quite a puzzle how, in spite of the incompatibility of tunneling and percolation networks, these composites conform…
Through modelling and simulations we show that material instabilities play a dominant role in the mechanical behavior of the fibrous collagen Extracellular Matrix (ECM), as observed when the ECM is deformed by contractile biological cells.…
The ordering of rod-like particles in soft, deformable containers emerges from the interplay of anisotropic interactions, geometric confinement, and boundary compliance. This competition couples internal particle organization to container…
Hard spheres confined to narrow quasi-one-dimensional cylindrical channels form perfect helical structures at close packing. Here, we use molecular dynamics simulation to show that the thermodynamics, structure and dynamics of the fluid…
A long cylindrical cavity through a soft solid forms a soft microfluidic channel, or models a vascular capillary. We observe experimentally that, when such a channel bears a pressurized fluid, it first dilates homogeneously, but then…
Ultrastructural fluctuations at nanoscale are fundamental to assess properties and functionalities of advanced out-of-equilibrium materials. We have taken myelin as a model of supramolecular assembly in out-of-equilibrium living matter.…