Related papers: Programmable Filaments and Textiles
The motion of active polymers in a porous medium is shown to depend critically on flexibilty, activity and degree of polymerization. For given Peclet number, we observe a transition from localisation to diffusion as the stiffness of the…
Certain bacteria form filamentous colonies when the cells fail to separate after dividing. In Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus thermus, and cyanobacteria, the filaments can wrap into complex supercoiled structures as the cells grow. The…
We use molecular dynamics simulations to study the dynamics of Janus particles, micro- or nanoparticles which are not spherically symmetric, in the uniform flow of a simple liquid. In particular we consider spheres with an asymmetry in the…
Active materials take advantage of their internal sources of energy to self-organize in an automated manner. This feature provides a novel opportunity to design micron-scale machines with minimal required control. However, self-organization…
Particle sedimentation through porous media is limited by the inability of passive material to overcome surface interactions and a tortuous network of pores. This limits transport, delivery, and effectiveness of chemicals used as reactants,…
Movements of molecular motors on cytoskeletal filaments are described by directed walks on a line. Detachment from this line is allowed to occur with a small probability. Motion in the surrounding fluid is described by symmetric random…
Motivated to understand the behavior of biological filaments interacting with membranes of various types, we study a theoretical model for the shape and thermodynamics of intrinsically-helical filaments bound to curved membranes. We show…
Active gels are a class of biologically-relevant material containing embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces acting on a sparse filament network. In vitro experiments of protein filaments and molecular motors have revealed a…
A salient feature of topological phases are surface states and many of the widely studied physical properties are directly tied to their existence. Although less explored, a variety of topological phases can however similarly be…
Transport properties of particles in confining geometries show very specific characteristics as lateral drift, oscillatory movement between lateral walls or the deformation of flexible fibers. These dynamics result from viscous friction…
We create mechanical metamaterials whose response to uniaxial compression can be programmed by lateral confinement, allowing monotonic, non-monotonic and hysteretic behavior. These functionalities arise from a broken rotational symmetry…
Active filaments are a workhorse for propulsion and actuation across biology, soft robotics and mechanical metamaterials. However, artificial active rods suffer from limited robustness and adaptivity because they rely on external control,…
Colloidal Janus spheres in water (one hemisphere attractive and the other repulsive) assemble into two-dimensional hexagonal crystals with orientational order controlled by anisotropic interactions. We exploit the decoupled translational…
We present a general theoretical analysis of semiflexible filaments subject to viscous drag or point forcing. These are the relevant forces in dynamic experiments designed to measure biopolymer bending moduli. By analogy with the ``Stokes…
We investigate active particles that exhibit long-range interactions only restricted by a field of view, which is characterized by an angle $\beta$. We show that constraining attractive interactions to a field of view leads to the emergence…
Systems driven far from equilibrium may exhibit anomalous density fluctuations: active matter with orientational order display giant density fluctuations at large scale, while systems of interacting particles close to an absorbing phase…
Initially straight slender elastic rods with geometrically constrained ends buckle and form stable two-dimensional shapes when compressed by bringing the ends together. It is also known that beyond a critical value of the pre-stress,…
Flexible ferromagnetic rings are spin-chain magnets, in which the magnetic and mechanical subsystems are coupled. The coupling is achieved through the tangentially oriented anisotropy axis. The possibility to operate the mechanics of the…
The kinetics of the assembly of semiflexible filaments through end-to-end annealing is key to the structure of the cytoskeleton, but is not understood. We analyze this problem through scaling theory and simulations, and uncover a regime…
We consider a mixture of one neutral and two oppositely charged types of molecules confined to a surface. Using analytical techniques and molecular dynamics simulations, we construct the phase diagram of the system and exhibit the…