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Physics-informed neural networks have emerged as a powerful tool in the scientific machine learning community, with applications to both forward and inverse problems. While they have shown considerable empirical success, significant…
The behaviour and fate of tissue cells is controlled by the rigidity and geometry of their adhesive environment, possibly through forces localized to sites of adhesion. We introduce a mechanical model that predicts cellular force…
Using a minimal model of cells or cohesive cell layers as continuum active elastic media, we examine the effect of substrate thickness and stiffness on traction forces exerted by strongly adhering cells. We obtain a simple expression for…
We apply a recently developed model of cytoskeletal force generation to study a cell intrinsic contractility, as well as its response to external loading. The model is based on a non-equilibrium thermodynamic treatment of the…
We introduce and study a new inverse problem for antiplane shear in elastic bodies with strain-gradient interfaces. The setting is a homogeneous isotropic elastic body containing an inclusion separated by a thin interface endowed with…
Cells can sense forces applied to them, but also the stiffness of their environment. These are two different phenomena, and here we investigate the mechanosensitivity of the IInd kind: how the cell can measure an elastic modulus at a single…
We combine confocal imaging, microfluidics and image analysis to record 3D-images of cells in flow. This enables us to recover the full 3D representation of several hundred living cells per minute. Whereas 3D confocal imaging has thus far…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
This work aims to describe a mathematical model and a numerical method to simulate a thin anisotropic composite membrane moving and deforming in 3D space under a dynamic load of an arbitrary time and space profile. The model and the method…
Inverse design of morphing slender structures with programmable curvature has significant applications in various engineering fields. Most existing studies formulate it as an optimization problem, which requires repeatedly solving the…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
Here, we address a dimension-reduction problem in the context of nonlinear elasticity where the applied external surface forces induce bending-torsion moments. The underlying body is a multi-structure in $\mathbb{R}^3$ consisting of a thin…
Bulk rheological properties of viscoelastic fluids have been extensively studied in macroscopic shearing geometries. However, little is known when an active microscopic probe is used to locally perturb them far from the linear-response…
Biophysical force spectroscopy tools - for example optical tweezers, magnetic tweezers, atomic force microscopy, - have been used to study elastic, mechanical, conformational and dynamic properties of single biological specimens from single…
Light forces induced by scattering and absorption in elastic dielectrics lead to local density modulations and deformations. These perturbations in turn modify light propagation in the medium and generate an intricate nonlinear response. We…
In the emerging field of 3D bioprinting, cell damage due to large deformations is considered a main cause for cell death and loss of functionality inside the printed construct. Those deformations, in turn, strongly depend on the…
The origin of rigidity in disordered materials is an outstanding open problem in statistical physics. Previously, a class of 2D cellular models has been shown to undergo a rigidity transition controlled by a mechanical parameter that…
The rigorous derivation of linear elasticity from finite elasticity by means of Gamma-convergence is a well-known result, which has been extended to different models also beyond the elastic regime. However, in these results the applied…
The paper addresses the underlying source of two forms of induced anisotropy in granular materials: contact orientation anisotropy and contact force anisotropy. A rational, mathematical structure is reviewed for the manner in which fabric…
The modeling of the elastic properties of disordered or nanoscale solids requires the foundations of the theory of elasticity to be revisited, as one explores scales at which this theory may no longer hold. The only cases for which…