Related papers: The Physics of Self-Rolling Viruses
The self-organised motion of vast numbers of creatures in a single direction is a spectacular example of emergent order. We recreate this phenomenon using actuated non-living components. We report here that millimetre-sized tapered rods,…
Helically coiled filaments are a frequent motif in nature. In situations commonly encountered in experiments coiled helices are squeezed flat onto two dimensional surfaces. Under such 2-D confinement helices form "squeelices" - peculiar…
Tracking experiments in dense biological tissues reveal a diversity of sources f or local energy injection at the cell scale. The effect of cell motility has been largely studied, but much less is known abo ut the effect of the observed…
Curvature plays a central role in the proper function of many biological processes. With active matter being a standard framework for understanding many aspects of the physics of life, it is natural to ask what effect curvature has on the…
The self-retracting motion of a graphene flake on a stack of graphene flakes is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. It is shown that in the case when the extended flake is initially rotated to an incommensurate state, there is no…
Propulsion of otherwise passive objects is achieved by mechanisms of active driving. We concentrate on cases in which the direction of active drive is subject to spontaneous symmetry breaking. In our case, this direction will be maintained,…
In a series of papers, D. E. Chang, et al., proved and experimentally demonstrated a phenomenon they termed "damping-induced self-recovery". However, these papers left a few questions concerning the observed phenomenon unanswered - in…
The infection pathway of virus in living cell is of interest from the viewpoint of the physics of diffusion. Here, recent developments about a diffusion theory for the infection pathway of an adeno-associated virus in cytoplasm of a living…
From footpaths to flight routes, human mobility networks facilitate the spread of communicable diseases. Control and elimination efforts depend on characterizing these networks in terms of connections and flux rates of individuals between…
Stick-slip motion, a common phenomenon observed during crawling of cells, is found to be strongly sensitive to the substrate stiffness. Stick-slip behaviours have previously been investigated typically using purely elastic substrates. For a…
We present an extensive experimental study and scaling analysis of friction of gelatin gels on glass. At low driving velocities, sliding occurs via propagation of periodic self-healing slip pulses whose velocity is limited by collective…
The leaves of many plants are superhydrophobic, a property that may have evolved to clean the leaves by encouraging water droplets to bead up and roll off. Superhydrophobic surfaces can also exhibit reduced friction and liquids flowing over…
A large number of curling shots using a wide range of rotational and translational velocities on two different ice surfaces have been recorded and analyzed. The observed curling rock trajectories are described in terms of a…
Micron-sized self-propelled (active) particles can be considered as model systems for characterizing more complex biological organisms like swimming bacteria or motile cells. We produce asymmetric microswimmers by soft lithography and study…
Movements of molecular motors on cytoskeletal filaments are described by directed walks on a line. Detachment from this line is allowed to occur with a small probability. Motion in the surrounding fluid is described by symmetric random…
Processive molecular motors which drive the traffic of organelles in cells move in a directed way along cytoskeletal filaments. On large time scales, they perform motor walks, i.e., peculiar random walks which arise from the repeated…
The process of self-morphing in curved surfaces found in nature, such as with the growth of flowers and leaves, has generated interest in the study of self-morphing bilayers, which has been used in many soft robots or switchers. However,…
Engines are open systems that can generate work cyclically, at the expense of an external disequilibrium. They are ubiquitous in nature and technology, but the course of mathematical physics over the last 300 years has tended to make their…
We study the elastic properties and mechanical stability of viral capsids under external force-loading with computer simulations. Our approach allows the implementation of specific geometries corresponding to specific phages such as…
The formation of periodic wrinkles in soft layered materials due to mechanical instabilities is prevalent in nature and has been proposed for use in multiple applications. However, such phenomena have been explored predominantly in…