Related papers: Soft and stiff normal modes in floppy colloidal sq…
The normal modes and relaxation rates of weak colloidal gels are investigated in computations employing different models of the hydrodynamic interactions between colloids. The eigenspectrum is computed for freely draining,…
Cellularized tissue and polymer networks can both transition from floppy to rigid as a function of their control parameters, and, yet, the two systems often mechanically interact, which may affect their respective rigidities. To study this…
Multivalent interactions between deformable mesoscopic units are ubiquitous in biology, where membrane macromolecules mediate the interactions between neighbouring living cells and between cells and solid substrates. Lately, analogous…
The shear response of soft solids can be modeled with linear elasticity, provided the forcing is slow and weak. Both of these approximations must break down when the material loses rigidity, such as in foams and emulsions at their…
Ring, or cyclic, polymers have unique properties compared to linear polymers, due to their topologically closed structure that has no beginning or end. Experimental measurements on molecular ring polymers are challenging due to their…
Recent experiments have demonstrated that the nonlinear elasticity of in vitro networks of the biopolymer actin is dramatically altered in the presence of a flexible cross-linker such as the abundant cytoskeletal protein filamin. The basic…
The square lattice with central-force springs on nearest-neighbor bonds is isostatic. It has a zero mode for each row and column, and it does not support shear. Using the Coherent Potential Approximation (CPA), we study how the random…
Rheological measurements of model colloidal gels reveal that large variations in the shear moduli as colloidal volume-fraction changes are not reflected by simple structural parameters such as the coordination number, which remains almost a…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
Amphiphilic lipid bilayers modify the friction properties of the surfaces on top of which they are deposited. In particular, the measured sliding friction coefficient is significantly reduced compared with the native surface. We investigate…
Matrix-vector multiplications are a fundamental building block of artificial intelligence; this essential role has motivated their implementation in a variety of physical substrates, from memristor crossbar arrays to photonic integrated…
As a function of connectivity, spring networks exhibit a critical transition between floppy and rigid phases at an isostatic threshold. For connectivity below this threshold, fiber networks were recently shown theoretically to exhibit a…
Fifteen years ago Monique Tirion showed that the low-frequency normal modes of a protein are not significantly altered when non-bonded interactions are replaced by Hookean springs, for all atom pairs whose distance is smaller than a given…
We study phase behaviours of lipid--bilayer vesicles functionalised by ligand--receptor complexes made of synthetic DNA by introducing a modelling framework and a dedicated experimental platform. In particular, we perform Monte Carlo…
Twisted graphene bilayers show a complex electronic structure, further modified by interaction effects. The main features can be obtained from effective models, which make use a few phenomenological parameters. We analyze the influence of…
The results obtained from molecular dynamics simulations of the friction at an interface between polymer melts and weakly attractive crystalline surfaces are reported. We consider a coarse-grained bead-spring model of linear chains with…
Experiments on supported lipid bilayers featuring liquid ordered/disordered domains have shown that the spatial arrangement of the lipid domains and their chemical composition are strongly affected by the curvature of the substrate.…
We study quasi-static deformation of dense granular packings. The packing is deformed by imposing external boundary conditions, which model engineering experiments such as shear and compression. We propose a two-dimensional network model of…
We devise a soft, solvent-free, coarse-grained model for lipid bilayer membranes. The non-bonded interactions take the form of a weighted-density functional which allows us to describe the thermodynamics of self-assembly and packing effects…