Related papers: Designing active colloidal folders
While all the information required for the folding of a protein is contained in its amino acid sequence, one has not yet learned how to extract this information to predict the three--dimensional, biologically active, native conformation of…
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…
Cells and microorganisms employ dynamic shape changes to enable steering and avoidance for efficient spatial exploration and collective organization. In contrast, active colloids, their synthetic counterparts, currently lack similar…
Because of consuming energy to drive their motion, systems of active colloids are intrinsically out of equilibrium. In the past decade, a variety of intriguing dynamic patterns have been observed in systems of active colloids, and they…
Active polymers play a central role in many biological systems, from bacterial flagella to cellular cytoskeletons. Minimal models of semiflexible active filaments have been used to study a variety of interesting phenomena in active systems,…
A phase diagram for a surface interacting long flexible partially directed polymer chain in a two-dimensional poor solvent where the possibility of collapse in the bulk exists is determined using exact enumeration method. We used a model of…
Motivated by recent experimental findings in chemical synthesis of colloidal particles, we draw an analogy between self-assembly processes occurring in biological systems (e.g. protein folding) and a new exciting possibility in the field of…
From the complex motions of robots to the oxygen binding of hemoglobin, the function of many mechanical systems depends on large, coordinated movements of their components. Such movements arise from a network of physical interactions in the…
Non-active disordered solids feature quasilocalized excitations that control plasticity, similar to crystal lattice defects, and these excitations can be identified via harmonic or anharmonic analyses of the potential energy landscape. Here…
Active matter comprises self-driven units, such as bacteria and synthetic microswimmers, that can spontaneously form complex patterns and assemble into functional microdevices. These processes are possible thanks to the out-of-equilibrium…
Cytoskeletal networks, which are essentially motor-filament assemblies, play a major role in many developmental processes involving structural remodeling and shape changes. These are achieved by nonequilibrium self-organization processes…
Machines enabled the Industrial Revolution and are central to modern technological progress: A machine's parts transmit forces, motion, and energy to one another in a predetermined manner. Today's engineering frontier, building artificial…
Natural protein sequences somehow encode the structural forms that these molecules adopt. Recent developments in structure-prediction are agnostic to the mechanisms by which proteins fold and represent them as static objects. However, the…
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…
Structures with artificial mechanical properties, often called mechanical metamaterials, exhibit divergent yet tunable performance. Various types of mechanical metamaterials have been proposed, which harness light or magnetic interactions,…
Foam is a canonical example of disordered soft matter where local force balance leads to the competition of many metastable configurations. Here we present an experimental and theoretical framework for "active foam" where an individual…
There is a growing need for robots that can change their shape, size and mechanical properties to adapt to evolving tasks and environments. However, current shape-changing systems generally utilize bespoke, system-specific mechanisms that…
It is well known that periodic potentials can be used to induce freezing and melting in colloids. Here, we transfer this concept to active systems and find the emergence of a so-far unknown active matter phase in between the frozen…
We study the dynamics of an ideal polymer chain in a crowded, viscoelastic medium and in the presence of active forces. The motion of the centre of mass and of individual monomers is calculated. On time scales that are comparable to the…
Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…