Related papers: Disordered biopolymer filament bundles: Topologica…
Motivated by the formation of ring-like filament structures in the cortex of plant and animal cells, we study the dynamics of a two-dimensional layer of cytoskeletal filaments and motor proteins near a surface by a general continuum theory.…
F-actin bundles constitute principal components of a multitude of cytoskeletal processes including stereocilia, filopodia, microvilli, neurosensory bristles, cytoskeletal stress fibers, and the sperm acrosome. The bending, buckling, and…
The formation, maintenance and reorganization of the cytoskeletal filament network is essential for a number of cellular processes. While the crucial role played by active forces generated by motor proteins has been studied extensively,…
We provide an extension to previous analysis of the localised beading instability of soft slender tubes under surface tension and axial stretching. The primary questions pondered here are: under what loading conditions, if any, can…
Many interesting shapes appearing in the biological world are formed by the onset of mechanical instability. In this work we consider how the build-up of residual stress can cause a solid to buckle. In all past studies a fictitious…
As far as the tensile properties of natural fibres as reinforcements for composites are concerned, flax fibres will stay at the top-end. However, an efficient conversion of fibre properties into their corresponding composite properties has…
Intermediate filaments are the least explored among the large cytoskeletal elements. We show here that they display conformational anomalies in narrow microfluidic channels. Their unusual behavior can be understood as the consequence of a…
We theoretically study the transport of time-bin entangled photon pairs in a two-dimensional topological photonic system of coupled ring resonators. This system implements the integer quantum Hall model using a synthetic gauge field and…
A novel bilayer is introduced, consisting of a stiff film adhered to a soft substrate with patterned holes beneath the film and substrate interface. To uncover the transition of surface patterns, two dimensional plane strain simulations are…
Reptation theory has been highly successful in explaining the unusual material properties of entangled polymer solutions. It reduces the complex many-body dynamics to a single-polymer description where each polymer is envisaged to be…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
Motivated by the observation of highly unstable flowing states in suspensions of microtubules and kinesin, we analyze a model of mutually-propelled filaments suspended in a solvent. The system undergoes a mean-field isotropic-nematic…
We consider diffeomorphisms $f$ with heteroclinic cycles associated to saddles $P$ and $Q$ of different indices. We say that a cycle of this type can be stabilized if there are diffeomorphisms close to $f$ with a robust cycle associated to…
In the experiments on stress-induced phase transitions in SMA strips, several interesting instability phenomena have been observed, including a necking-type instability, a shear-type instability and an orientation instability. By using the…
Advanced vector imaging techniques provide us with 3D maps of magnetization fields in which topological concepts can be directly applied to describe real-space experimental textures in non-ideal geometries. Here, the 3D magnetization of a…
We present a simple model for the bidirectional dynamics of actin bundles with alternating polarities in gliding assays with non-processive myosin motors. In the model, the bundle is represented as an elastic chain consisting of monomers…
We theoretically explore the possibility of sausage instabilities developing on top of a kink instability in lengthening current-carrying magnetic flux tubes. Observations indicate that the dynamics of magnetic flux tubes in our cosmos and…
We consider how beads can diffuse along a chain that wraps them, without becoming displaced from the chain; our proposed mechanism is analogous to the reptation of "stored length" in more familiar situations of polymer dynamics. The problem…
We have investigated the structures and electronic properties of ultra-thin Bi(110) films grown on an s-wave superconductor substrate using low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. Remarkably, our experimental results…
We present a braided circuit topology framework for investigating topology and structural phase transitions in aggregates of semiflexible polymers. In the conventional approach to circuit topology, which specifically applies to single…