Related papers: Entanglement transition in random rod packings

Many organisms exhibit branching morphologies that twist around each other and become entangled. Entanglement occurs when different objects interlock, creating complex and often irreversible configurations. This physical phenomenon is…

Significant challenges exist in the nonlinear extensional rheology of entangled polymers. With simulations, we show that the key to understanding this problem is to recognize the existence and importance of a strain-induced crossover from…

Entangled networks of stiff biopolymers exhibit complex dynamic response, emerging from the topological constraints that neighboring filaments impose upon each other. We propose a class of reference models for entanglement dynamics of stiff…

The packing of elastic bodies has emerged as a paradigm for the study of macroscopic disordered systems. However, progress is hampered by the lack of controlled experiments. Here we consider a model experiment for the isotropic…

In composite materials composed of soft polymer matrix and stiff, high-aspect-ratio particles, the composite undergoes a transition in mechanical strength when the inclusion phase surpasses a critical density. This phenomenon (rheological…

Stress-strain relations for random packings of entangling chains under triaxial compression can exhibit strain stiffening and sustain stresses several orders-of-magnitude beyond typical granular materials. X-ray tomography reveals the…

We use Brownian dynamics simulations and advanced topological profiling methods to characterize the out-of-equilibrium evolution of self-entanglement in linear polymers confined into nano-channels and under periodic compression. We…

We investigate the entanglement within a system undergoing a random, local process. We find that there is initially a phase of very fast generation and spread of entanglement. At the end of this phase the entanglement is typically maximal.…

Confined thin structures are ubiquitous in nature. Spatial and length constraints have led to a number of novel packing strategies at both the micro-scale, as when DNA packages inside a capsid, and the macro-scale, seen in plant root…

Spatially ordered systems confined to surfaces such as spheres exhibit interesting topological structures because of curvature induced frustration in orientational as well as translational order. The study of these structures is important…

Experimental analysis of the mechanics of a deformable object, and particularly its stability, requires repetitive testing and, depending on the complexity of the object's shape, a testing setup that can manipulate many degrees of freedom…

Entanglement is the key feature of many-body quantum systems, and the development of new tools to probe it in the laboratory is an outstanding challenge. Measuring the entropy of different partitions of a quantum system provides a way to…

This study investigates the entanglement properties of disordered free fermion systems undergoing an Anderson phase transition from a delocalized to a localized phase. The entanglement entropy is employed to quantify the degree of…

Topological properties of quantum systems are one of the most intriguing emerging phenomena in condensed matter physics. A crucial property of topological systems is the symmetry-protected robustness towards local noise. Experiments have…

The packing problem of long thin filaments that are injected into confined spaces is of fundamental interest for physicists and biologists alike. How linear threads pack and coil is well known only for the ideal case of rigid containers,…

The exact dynamics of the entanglement between two harmonic modes generated by an angular momentum coupling is examined. Such system arises when considering a particle in a rotating anisotropic harmonic trap or a charged particle in a fixed…

Many native structures of proteins accomodate complex topological motifs such as knots, lassos, and other geometrical entanglements. How proteins can fold quickly even in the presence of such topological obstacles is a debated question in…

Twisted and rope-like assemblies of filamentous molecules are common and vital structural elements in cells and tissue of living organisms. We study the intrinsic frustration occurring in these materials between the two-dimensional…

We study the entanglement dynamics of a system consisting of a large number of coupled harmonic oscillators in various configurations and for different types of nearest neighbour interactions. For a one-dimensional chain we provide compact…

We propose a new procedure to monitor and forecast the onset of transitions in high dimensional complex systems. We describe our procedure by an application to the Tangled Nature model of evolutionary ecology. The quasi-stable…