Related papers: Combing a double helix
Hair cells of the auditory and vestibular systems display astonishing sensitivity, frequency selectivity, and temporal resolution to external signals. These specialized cells utilize an internal active amplifier to achieve highly sensitive…
Mixing describes the process by which solutes evolve from an initial heterogeneous state to uniformity under the stirring action of a fluid flow. Fluid stretching forms thin scalar lamellae which coalesce due to molecular diffusion. Owing…
Starting from the entanglement wedge of a multipartite mixed state we describe a purification procedure which involves the gluing of several copies. The resulting geometry has non-trivial topology and a single oriented boundary for each…
We investigate the wetting properties of surfaces patterned with fine elastic hairs, with an emphasis on identifying superhydrophobic states on hydrophilic hairs. We formulate a two dimensional model of a large drop in contact with a row of…
We use a three-dimensional formulation of the cell vertex model to describe the mechanical properties of a confluent planar monolayer of prismatic cells. Treating cell height as a degree of freedom, we reduce the model to a two-dimensional…
We study geometrical aspects of entanglement, with the Hilbert--Schmidt norm defining the metric on the set of density matrices. We focus first on the simplest case of two two-level systems and show that a ``relativistic'' formulation leads…
The system of an atom couples to two distinct optical cavities with phase decoherence is studied by making use of a dynamical algebraic method. We adopt the concurrence to characterize the entanglement between atom and cavities or between…
Collective cell migration governs a range of physiological and pathological processes, from tissue morphogenesis to cancer invasion, in which topological defects arise as an inevitable consequence of frequent cellular rearrangement and…
Diffusion in cell biology is important and complicated. Diffusing particles must contend with a complex environment as they make their way through the cell. We analyze a particular type of complexity that arises when diffusing particles…
We study a quantum mechanical system consisting of up to three identical dipoles confined to move along a helical shaped trap. The long-range interactions between particles confined to move in this one dimension leads to an interesting…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…
The hairs of a painting brush withdrawn from a wetting liquid self-assemble into clumps whose sizes rely on a balance between liquid surface tension and hairs bending rigidity. Here we study the situation of an immersed carpet in an…
The model of the deformation of DNA macromolecule is developed with the accounting of two types of components of deformation: external and internal. External components describe the bend, twist and stretch of the double helix. The internal…
When a fluid-immersed array of lamellae or filaments that is attached to a substrate is dried, evaporation leads to the formation of menisci on the tips of the plates or pillars that bring them together. Similarly, when hair dries it clumps…
Bundles of filaments are subject to geometric frustration: certain deformations (e.g. bending while twisted) require longitudinal variations in spacing between filaments. While bundles are common -- from protein fibers to yarns -- the…
This is an archival document; the work contains theoretical development to be used in new publications and to stimulate further development. Here, we develop a statistical mechanical treatment of a braid formed of two molecules subject to…
Peritrichous bacteria swim in viscous fluids by rotating multiple helical flagellar filaments. As the bacterium swims forward, all its flagella rotate in synchrony behind the cell in a helical bundle. When the bacterium changes its…
We present a method to construct entanglement measures for pure states of multipartite qubit systems. The key element of our approach is an antilinear operator that we call {\em comb} in reference to the {\em hairy-ball theorem}. For qubits…
The biological function of a protein stems from its 3-dimensional structure, which is thermodynamically determined by the energetics of interatomic forces between its amino acid building blocks (the order of amino acids, known as the…
A covering code is a set of codewords with the property that the union of balls, suitably defined, around these codewords covers an entire space. Generally, the goal is to find the covering code with the minimum size codebook. While most…