Related papers: Elasticity tunes mechanical stress localization ar…
Collective behaviors in cellular systems are regulated not only by biochemical signalling pathways but also by intercellular mechanical forces, whose quantification in contractile monolayers remains poorly understood. Here, by integrating…
In topology optimization of compliant mechanisms, the specific placement of boundary conditions strongly affects the resulting material distribution and performance of the design. At the same time, the most effective locations of the loads…
Interfaces in tissues are ubiquitous, both between tissue and environment as well as between populations of different cell types. The propagation of an interface can be driven mechanically. % e.g. by a difference in the respective…
Cross slip of screw dislocations in crystalline solids is a stress-driven thermally activated process essential to many phenomena during plastic deformation, including dislocation pattern formation, strain hardening, and dynamic recovery.…
In pulsating active matter, topological defects are motile despite the absence of any macroscopic flows and microscopic self-propulsion. We reveal that this motility arises from a ratchet effect: the mechanochemical coupling between local…
How do cells tune emergent properties at the scale of tissues? One class of such emergent behaviors are rigidity transitions, in which a tissue changes from a solid-like to a fluid-like state or vice versa. Here, we introduce a new way for…
Topological defects in active liquid crystals can be confined by introducing gradients of activity. Here, we examine the dynamical behavior of two defects confined by a sharp gradient of activity that separates an active circular region and…
To produce sounds, we adjust the tension of our vocal folds to shape their properties and control the pitch. This efficient mechanism offers inspiration for designing reconfigurable materials and adaptable soft robots. However,…
Active systems, from bacterial suspensions to cellular monolayers, are continuously driven out of equilibrium by local injection of energy from their constituent elements and exhibit turbulent-like and chaotic patterns. Here we demonstrate…
Elastic strain has the potential for a controlled manipulation of the band gap and spin-polarized Dirac states of topological materials, which can lead to pseudo-magnetic-field effects, helical flat bands and topological phase transitions.…
An elastic disk is coated with an elastic rod, uniformly prestressed with a tensile or compressive axial force. The prestress state is assumed to be induced by three different models of external radial load or by 'shrink-fit' forcing the…
Monolayers of anisotropic cells exhibit long-ranged orientational order and topological defects. During the development of organisms, orientational order often influences morphogenetic events. However, the linkage between the mechanics of…
Exact solutions are derived for the problem of a two-dimensional, infinitely anisotropic, linear-elastic medium containing a periodic lattice of voids. The matrix material possesses either one infinitely soft, or one infinitely hard loading…
We investigate how material rigidity acts as a key control parameter for the failure of solids under stress. In both experiments and simulations, we demonstrate that material failure can be continuously tuned by varying the underlying…
Topological constraints have long been known to provide efficient mechanisms for localizing and storing energy across a range of length scales, from knots in DNA to turbulent plasmas. Despite recent theoretical and experimental progress on…
Flexible strain sensors are critical to several potential intelligent applications, such as human-machine interfaces, soft robotics, human motion detection, and safety monitoring of components. Stretchable functional materials are important…
We present a novel, self-consistent and robust theoretical model to investigate elastic interactions between topological defects in liquid crystal shells. Accounting for the non-concentric nature of the shell in a simple manner, we are able…
In recent years there has been renewed interest in the behavior of dislocations in crystals that exhibit strong atomic scale disorder, as typical of compositionally complex single phase alloys. The behavior of dislocations in such crystals…
Genomic DNA is constantly subjected to various mechanical stresses arising from its biological functions and cell packaging. If the local mechanical properties of DNA change under torsional and tensional stress, the activity of…
Molecular topology of polymers plays a key role in determining their physical properties. We studied herein the topological effects on the static and dynamic properties of a 2D catenated network of DNA rings called a kinetoplast.…