Related papers: Direct imaging of polymer filaments pulled from re…
Motivated by recent experimental observations of capillary-induced spooling of fibers inside droplets both in spider capture silk and in synthetic systems, we investigate the behavior of a fiber packed in a drop. Using a simplified 2D…
It is known from the wave-like motion of microtubules in motility assays that the piconewton forces that motors produce can be sufficient to bend the filaments. In cellular phenomena such as cytosplasmic streaming, molecular motors…
Soft matters whose constituents are deformable are ubiquitous in nature especially in biological systems-including cells and their organelles-as well as in foams and emulsions. The capacity for deformation in these soft materials gives rise…
Our understanding of the structural features of foams and emulsions has advanced significantly over the last 20 years. However, with a search for "super-stable" liquid dispersions, foam and emulsion science employs increasingly complex…
In this work, we report the phenomenon of formation of particle aggregates in the form of thin slender strings when a polyacrylamide (PAM) solution, laden with polystyrene (PS) particles is introduced into a microfluidic device containing…
Mixtures of polymers of varying topologies and stiffnesses display complex emergent rheological properties that often cannot be predicted from their single-component counterparts. For example, entangled blends of ring and linear polymers…
We study a simple two-dimensional model for motion of an elastic filament subject to internally generated stresses and show that wave-like propagating shapes which can propel the filament can be induced by a self-organized mechanism via a…
Space-saving design is a requirement that is encountered in biological systems and the development of modern technological devices alike. Many living organisms dynamically pack their polymer chains, filaments or membranes inside of…
The formation and destabilisation of viscoelastic filaments are of importance in many industrial and biological processes. Filament instabilities have been observed for viscoelastic fluids but recently also for soft elastic solids. In this…
The sliding of non-Newtonian drops down planar surfaces results in a complex, entangled balance between interfacial forces and non linear viscous dissipation, which has been scarcely inspected. In particular, a detailed understanding of the…
The continuing development of evaporative lithography is important for many areas such as the creation of photonic crystals for optronics and microelectronics, the development of biosensors for medical applications and biotechnology, 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…
We investigate the dynamics of a particle moving randomly along a disordered hetero-polymer subjected to rapid conformational changes which induce superdiffusive motion in chemical coordinates. We study the antagonistic interplay between…
We report experiments, modeling and numerical simulations of the self--assembly of particle patterns obtained from a nanometric metallic square grid. Initially, nickel filaments of rectangular cross section are patterned on a SiO$_2$ flat…
We investigate morphologies of semiflexible polymer rings, such as circular DNA, which are adsorbed onto topographically or chemically structured substrate surfaces. We classify all equilibrium morphologies for two striped surface…
The classical picture of a star-forming filament is a near-equilibrium structure, with collapse dependent on its gravitational criticality. Recent observations have complicated this picture, revealing filaments as a mess of apparently…
Observations indicate that dense molecular filamentary clouds are sites of star formation. The filament width determines the most unstable scale for self-gravitational fragmentation and influences the stellar mass. Therefore, constraining…
Electroporation is a physical method to induce the uptake of therapeutic drugs and DNA, by eukaryotic cells and tissues. The phenomena behind electro-mediated membrane permeabilization to plasmid DNA have been shown to be significantly more…
Certain sequences of peptoid polymers (synthetic analogs of peptides) assemble into bilayer nanosheets via a nonequilibrium assembly pathway of adsorption, compression, and collapse at an air-water interface. As with other large-scale…
The mechanics of single-chain stretching and rupture are central to understanding the resilience of biological polymers and designing strong and tough soft materials such as double-network gels and multi-network elastomers. In this work, we…