Related papers: Thermal Schwinger Effect: Defect Production in Com…
A coarse-grained molecular simulation approach originally developed for entangled polymeric liquids is extended to model the mechanical behavior of long-fiber networks. The model, based on the slip-link picture of chain entanglements,…
A collection of thin structures buckle, bend, and bump into each-other when confined. This contact can lead to the formation of patterns: hair will self-organize in curls; DNA strands will layer into cell nuclei; paper, when crumpled, will…
We develop a model for charge trapping on conjugated polymer chains using a continuous representation of the polymer. By constraining the motion to along the chain, we find that kinks along the chain serve as points of attraction and can…
The production of electron-positron pairs in time-dependent electric fields (Schwinger mechanism) depends non-linearly on the applied field profile. Accordingly, the resulting momentum spectrum is extremely sensitive to small variations of…
Nanoscale polymeric thin films are widely used in diverse applications such as energy devices, flexible electronics and biosensors, where a satisfactory mechanical performance is of vital importance to realize their full functionality. It…
The cytoskeleton is an inhomogeneous network of semi-flexible filaments, which are involved in a wide variety of active biological processes. Although the cytoskeletal filaments can be very stiff and embedded in a dense and cross-linked…
When sheared, most elastic solids such as metals, rubbers and polymer hydrogels dilate in the direction perpendicular to the shear plane. This well-known behaviour known as the Poynting effect is characterized by a positive normal stress.…
Thermal conductivity of aligned polymer molecules can be exceptionally high along the alignment direction due to energy transport through strong covalent bonds. At the same time, it is highly sensitive to molecular conformation, varying by…
We propose a generic model to describe the mechanical response and failure of systems which undergo a series of stick-slip events when subjected to an external load. We model the system as a bundle of fibers, where single fibers can…
Cross-linked polymer networks with orientational order constitute a wide class of soft materials and are relevant to biological systems (e.g., F-actin bundles). We analytically study the nonlinear force-extension relation of an array of…
Active processes in living systems generate nonequilibrium forces that deform embedded passive macromolecules. To understand how such dynamics influence polymer conformation, we study a flexible passive chain in an active nematic fluid.…
A block of rubber eventually buckles under severe flexure, and several axial wrinkles appear on the inner curved face of the bent block. Experimental measurements reveal that the buckling occurs earlier ---at lower compressive strains---…
A slender object undergoing an axial compression will buckle to alleviate the stress. Typically the morphology of the deformed object depends on the bending stiffness for solids, or the viscoelastic properties for liquid threads. We study a…
The interplay of topological constraints and Coulomb interactions in static and dynamic properties of charged polymers is investigated by numerical simulations and scaling arguments. In the absence of screening, the long-range interaction…
Buckling in compression is the archetype of elastic instability: when compressed along its longest dimension, a thin structure such as a playing card will buckle out-of-plane accommodating the imposed compression without a significant…
Biaxial strain effects on electronic structures and thermoelectric properties of monolayer $\mathrm{PtTe_2}$ are investigated by using generalized gradient approximation (GGA) plus spin-orbit coupling (SOC) for the electron part and GGA for…
Filler-polymer interactions are one of the keys to understanding the physical properties of polymer composites. These interactions give rise to an interface with specific properties that may have a nontrivial effect on the macroscopic…
We study the effects of intrinsic sequence-dependent curvature for a two dimensional semiflexible biopolymer with short-range correlation in intrinsic curvatures. We show exactly that when not subjected to any external force, such a system…
Biopolymer networks from the intracellular to tissue scale display high rigidity and tensile stress while having coordinations well below the normal threshold for mechanical rigidity. The elastic filaments in these networks are often…
Biofilament-motor protein complexes are ubiquitous in biology and drive the transport of cargo vital for many fundamental cellular processes. As they move, motor proteins exert compressive forces on the filaments to which they are attached,…