Related papers: Crosslinker mobility weakens transient polymer net…
Continuum elasticity is a powerful tool applicable in a broad range of physical systems and phenomena. Yet, understanding how and on what scales material disorder may lead to the breakdown of continuum elasticity is not fully understood. We…
Composites of flexible and rigid polymers are ubiquitous in biology and industry alike, yet the physical principles determining their mechanical properties are far from understood. Here, we couple force spectroscopy with large-scale…
A microscopic model of a surface polymer network - membrane system is introduced, with contact polymer surface interactions that can be either repulsive or attractive and sliplinks of functionality four randomly distributed over the…
The quasi-equilibrium evolution of the helical fraction occurring in a biopolymer network (gelatin gel) under an applied stress has been investigated by observing modulation in its optical activity. Its variation with the imposed chain…
Properties of disordered nematic elastomers and gels are theoretically investigated with emphasis on the roles of non-local elastic interactions and crosslinking conditions. Networks originally crosslinked in the isotropic phase lose their…
Materials with network-like microstructure, including polymers, are the backbone for many natural and human-made materials such as gels, biological tissues, metamaterials, and rubbers. Fracture processes in these networked materials are…
Associative polymer networks have shown a major promise in fabrication of self-healing and responsive materials. The can also serve as simple models to study more complex biological systems where transient interactions play an important…
It is well known that many biochemical processes in the cell such as gene regulation, growth signals and activation of ion channels, rely on mechanical stimuli. However, the mechanism by which mechanical signals propagate through cells is…
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 predict the thermodynamic and structural behavior of solutions of long cross-linked filaments. We find that at the mean field level, the entropy of self-assembled junctions induces an effective attraction between the filaments that can…
We introduce an entropic network model for copolymer elastomers based on the evolution of microscopic chain conformations during deformation. We show that the stress results from additive contributions due to chain stretch at the global as…
Experiments have shown that elasticity of disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks is very different from networks with rigid crosslinks. Here, we model and analyze filamentous networks as a collection of randomly oriented…
Synthetic polymers have a distribution of chain lengths which can be characterized by dispersity, D. Macroscopic properties of polymers are influenced by chain mobility in the melt and manipulating D can significantly impact these…
Crosslinks and molecular motors play an important role in the organization of cytoskeletal filament networks. Here we incorporate the effect of crosslinks into our model of polar motor-filament organization [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 71}, 050901…
We consider the dynamics of a translocation process of a flexible linear polymer through a nanopore into an environment of active rods in the {\it trans} side. Using Langevin dynamics simulations we find that the rods facilitate…
Classical network elasticity theories are based on the concept of flexible volumeless polymers fixed into a network in which there are no excluded volume, or even topological interactions, and where the chains explore accessible…
Our understanding of how chromosomes structurally organize and dynamically interact has been revolutionized through the lens of long-chain polymer physics. Major protein contributors to chromosome structure and dynamics are condensin and…
The transport of solvent molecules through soft, swollen networks is critical in both natural and engineered systems. While this poroelastic flow has traditionally been explored in networks where the mesh size is comparable to the solvent…
We analyze the stretching elasticity of a wormlike chain with a tension discontinuity resulting from a Hookean spring connecting its backbone to a fixed point. The elasticity of isolated semiflexible filaments has been the subject in a…
We present a revised theoretical study of the affine assumption applied to semiflexible networks. Drawing on simple models of semiflexible worm-like chains we derive an expression for the probability distribution of crosslink separations…