Related papers: Anomalous linear elasticity of disordered networks
The mechanics of disordered fibrous networks such as those that make up the extracellular matrix are strongly dependent on the local connectivity or coordination number. For biopolymer networks this coordination number is typically between…
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…
It is investigated the statistical properties of random walks evolving on real configurations of a crumpled wire rigidly jammed in two dimensions. These crumpled hierarchical structures with complex topology are obtained from a metallic…
Amorphous particulate matter constitutes a wide range of natural and synthetic materials. Despite this ubiquity, the way in which these systems' disordered microstructure couples to their often subtle and complex dynamical behavior is not…
Sub-diffusion in biological systems is conventionally treated as anomalous, requiring fractional derivatives, heavy-tailed waiting times, or fitted memory kernels. We argue that this anomaly is an artifact of an incomplete phase space.…
The response of amorphous solids to a mechanical perturbation consists in an elastic and a plastic deformation. The latter is mediated by localized irreversible rearrangements associated with Eshelby-like quadrupolar singularities in the…
Here, we provide an overview of theoretical approaches to semiflexible polymers and their networks. Such semiflexible polymers have large bending rigidities that can compete with the entropic tendency of a chain to crumple up into a random…
Many transport processes in nature exhibit anomalous diffusive properties with non-trivial scaling of the mean square displacement, e.g., diffusion of cells or of biomolecules inside the cell nucleus, where typically a crossover between…
Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…
A minimal model for studying the mechanical properties of amorphous solids is a disordered network of point masses connected by unbreakable springs. At a critical value of its mean connectivity, such a network becomes fragile: it undergoes…
Collagen is the most abundant extracellular-network-forming protein in animal biology and is important in both natural and artificial tissues, where it serves as a material of great mechanical versatility. This versatility arises from its…
The correlation properties of the nonaffine elastic response in strongly disordered materials are investigated using the theory of correlated random matrices and supported by numerical models. While the nonaffine displacement field itself…
Living materials such as membranes, cytoskeletal assemblies, cell collectives and tissues can often be described as active solids -- materials that are energized from within, with elastic response about a well defined reference…
The dynamics of elastocapillary thinning in high molecular weight polymer solutions are re-examined using high-speed digital video microscopy. At long times, the evolution of the viscoelastic thread deviates from self-similar exponential…
Disordered hyperuniformity is a description of hidden correlations in point distributions revealed by an anomalous suppression in fluctuations of local density at various coarse-graining length scales. In the absorbing phase of models…
When a periodic 1D system described by a tight-binding model is uniformly initialized with equal amplitudes at all sites, yet with completely random phases, it evolves into a thermal distribution with no spatial correlations. However, when…
The recent discovery of universal principles underlying many complex networks occurring across a wide range of length scales in the biological world has spurred physicists in trying to understand such features using techniques from…
Multilayer systems are coupled networks characterized by different contexts (layers) of interaction and have gained much attention recently due to their suitability to describe a broad spectrum of empirical complex systems. They are very…
In a diversity of physiological contexts, eukaryotic cells adhere to an extracellular matrix (ECM), a disordered network with complex nonlinear mechanics. Such cells can perform mechanosensation: using local force probing they can measure…
The mechanical properties of biological materials are spatially heterogeneous. Typical tissues are made up of a spanning fibrous extracellular matrix in which various inclusions, such as living cells, are embedded. While the influence of…