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In a diversity of physiological contexts, eukaryotic cells adhere to an extracellular matrix (ECM), a disordered network with complex nonlinear mechanics. Such cells can perform mechanosensation: using local force probing they can measure…
Isostatic networks are minimally rigid and therefore have, generically, nonzero elastic moduli. Regular isostatic networks have finite moduli in the limit of large sizes. However, numerical simulations show that all elastic moduli of…
Shearing stresses can change the volume of a material via a nonlinear effect known as shear dilatancy. We calculate the elastic dilatancy coefficient of soft sphere packings and random spring networks, two canonical models of marginal…
We study the elasto-plastic behaviour of materials made of individual (discrete) objects, such as a liquid foam made of bubbles. The evolution of positions and mutual arrangements of individual objects is taken into account through…
Collagen fibrils are the main structural component of load-bearing tissues such as tendons, ligaments, skin, the cornea of the eye, and the heart. The D-band of collagen fibrils is an axial periodic density modulation that can be easily…
All solids yield under sufficiently high mechanical loads. Below yield, the mechanical responses of all disordered solids are nearly alike, but above yield every different disordered solid responds in its own way. Brittle systems can…
We analyse the flow curves of a two-dimensional assembly of granular particles which are interacting via frictional contact forces. For packing fractions slightly below jamming, the fluid undergoes a large scale instability, implying a…
Entangled granular systems exhibit mechanical rigidity and resistance to deformation, reminiscent of cohesive materials, due to their reduced degrees of freedom and contact friction. A quantitative understanding of how classical granular…
Random packings of granular chains are presented as a model polymer system to investigate the contribution of entanglements to strain-stiffening in the absence of Brownian motion. The chain packings are sheared in triaxial compression…
Network formation of associative semiflexible fibers and mixtures of fibers and colloidal particles is simulated for the Johnson-Kendall-Roberts (JKR) model of elastic contacts, and a phase diagram in terms of particle elasticity and…
Active networks made of biopolymers and motor proteins are valuable bioinspired systems that have been used in the last decades to study the cytoskeleton and its self-organization under mechanical stimulation. Different techniques are…
When stressed sufficiently, solid materials yield and deform plastically via reorganization of microscopic constituents. Indeed, it is possible to alter the micro-structure of materials by judicious application of stress, an empirical pro-…
Guided by experiments contrasting electrically accelerated recovery with natural healing, this study formulates a model to investigate the importance of electroactive differential growth and morphological changes in tissue repair. It…
Epithelial cell layers on soft elastic substrates or pillar arrays are commonly used as model systems for investigating the role of force in tissue growth, maintenance and repair. Here we show analytically that the experimentally observed…
We propose a general method for deriving one-dimensional models for nonlinear structures. It captures the contribution to the strain energy arising not only from the macroscopic elastic strain as in classical structural models, but also…
Hierarchically modular organization is a canonical network topology that is evolutionarily conserved in the nervous systems of animals. Within the network, neurons form directional connections defined by the growth of their axonal…
Disordered solids respond to quasistatic shear with intermittent avalanches of plastic activity, an example of the crackling noise observed in many nonequilibrium critical systems. The temporal power spectrum of activity within disordered…
The rheology of dense amorphous materials under large shear strain is not fully understood, partly due to the difficulty of directly viewing the microscopic details of such materials. We use a colloidal suspension to simulate amorphous…
We investigate the stationary flow of a colloidal gel under an inhomogeneous external shear force using adaptive Brownian dynamics simulations. The interparticle forces are derived from the Stillinger-Weber potential, where the three-body…
Bone is mineralized tissue constituting the skeletal system, supporting and protecting body organs and tissues. At the molecular level, mineralized collagen fibril is the basic building block of bone tissue, and hence, understanding bone…