Related papers: Understanding cytoskeletal avalanches using mechan…
The brain keeps its overall dynamics in a corridor of intermediate activity and it has been a long standing question what possible mechanism could achieve this task. Mechanisms from the field of statistical physics have long been suggesting…
The human body is a complex organism whose gross mechanical properties are enabled by an interconnected musculoskeletal network controlled by the nervous system. The nature of musculoskeletal interconnection facilitates stability, voluntary…
Networks of filamentous proteins play a crucial role in cell mechanics. These cytoskeletal networks, together with various crosslinking and other associated proteins largely determine the (visco)elastic response of cells. In this letter we…
Mitochondrial networks exhibit a variety of complex behaviors, including coordinated cell-wide oscillations of energy states as well as a phase transition (depolarization) in response to oxidative stress. Since functional and structural…
Recent observations of beating signals in the excitation energy transfer dynamics of photosynthetic complexes have been interpreted as evidence for sustained coherences that are sufficiently long-lived for energy transport and coherence to…
Understanding how fluctuations propagate across spatial scales is central to our understanding of inanimate matter from turbulence to critical phenomena. In contrast to physical systems, biological systems are organized into a hierarchy of…
Understanding how the effectiveness of natural photosynthetic energy harvesting systems arises from the interplay between quantum coherence and environmental noise represents a significant challenge for quantum theory. Recently it has begun…
Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, colloids, granular materials, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large…
We report the first measurements of the intrinsic strain fluctuations of living cells using a recently-developed tracer correlation technique along with a theoretical framework for interpreting such data in heterogeneous media with…
In this thesis I study the dynamics of some nonequilibrium systems, using both computer simulations and theoretical tools. In particular, the following topics are studied: (i) metastability in a nonequilibrium ferromagnetic system, (ii) the…
The major biochemical networks of the living cell, the network of interacting genes and the network of biochemical reactions, are highly interdependent, however, they have been studied mostly as separate systems so far. In the last years an…
Transitions from quiescence to collective migration in epithelia underlie wound healing and cancer invasion, yet their physical origin remains poorly understood. Here we show that quiescent epithelial monolayers store spatially contractile…
The composite cytoskeleton, comprising interacting networks of semiflexible actin and rigid microtubules, actively generates forces and restructures using motor proteins such as myosins to enable key mechanical processes including cell…
Cells and tissues have the remarkable ability to actively generate the forces required to change their shape. This active mechanical behavior is largely mediated by the actin cytoskeleton, a crosslinked network of actin filaments that is…
Fast and accurate structural dynamics analysis is important for structural design and damage assessment. Structural dynamics analysis leveraging machine learning techniques has become a popular research focus in recent years. Although the…
Many complex systems respond to a continuous input of energy by an accumulation of stress over time, interrupted by sudden energy releases called avalanches. Recently, it has been pointed out that several basic features of avalanche…
Cortical networks exhibit synchronized activity which often occurs in spontaneous events in the form of spike avalanches. Since synchronization has been causally linked to central aspects of brain function such as selective signal…
Active turbulence, or chaotic self-organized collective motion, is often observed in concentrated suspensions of motile bacteria and other systems of self-propelled interacting agents. To date, there is no fundamental understanding of how…
Quantum scattering is used ubiquitously in both experimental and theoretical physics across a wide range of disciplines, from high-energy physics to mesoscopic physics. In this work, we uncover universal relations for the energy…
Spatially confined rigid membranes reorganize their morphology in response to the imposed constraints. A crumpled elastic sheet presents a complex pattern of random folds focusing the deformation energy while compressing a membrane resting…