Related papers: Nonlinearity-induced conformational instability an…
Buckling plays a critical role in the transport and dynamics of elastic microfilaments in Stokesian fluids. However, previous work has only considered filaments with homogeneous structural properties. Filament backbone stiffness can be…
We analyze the nonequilibrium dynamics of single inextensible semiflexible biopolymers as stretching forces are applied at the ends. Based on different (contradicting) heuristic arguments, various scaling laws have been proposed for the…
We study the effects of intrinsic sequence-dependent curvature for a two dimensional semiflexible biopolymer with short-range correlation in intrinsic curvatures. We show exactly that when not subjected to any external force, such a system…
We report that a dielectric polymer chain, constrained at both ends, sharply collapses when exposed to a high electric field. The chain collapse is driven by nonlocal dipolar interactions and anisotropic polarization of monomers, a…
Induced by proteins within the cell membrane or by differential growth, heating, or swelling, spontaneous curvatures can drastically affect the morphology of thin bodies and induce mechanical instabilities. Yet, the interaction of…
In layered materials, a common mode of deformation involves buckling of the layers under tensile deformation in the direction perpendicular to the layers. The instability mechanism, which operates in elastic materials from geological to…
Over the past decade, autophoretic colloids have emerged as a prototypical system for studying self-propelled motion at microscopic scales, with promising applications in microfluidics, micromachinery, and therapeutics. Their motion in a…
A simple phenomenological model for describing the conformational dynamics of biological macromolecules via the nonlinearity-induced instabilities is proposed. It is shown that the interaction between charges and bending degrees of freedom…
Hollow microgels are elastic polymer shells easily realizable in experiments. Recent works have shown the emergence of buckling events in dilute hollow microgels under the effect of an added osmotic pressure. Here, we perform large-scale…
Active polymers possess numerous unique properties that are quite different from those observed in the system of small active molecule due to the intricate interplay between their activity and topological constraints. This study focuses on…
The folding transition of biopolymers from the coil to compact structures has attracted wide research interest in the past and is well studied in polymer physics. Recent seminal works on DNA in confined devices have shown that these long…
Oriented block copolymers exhibit a buckling instability when submitted to a tensile test perpendicular to the lamellae direction. In this paper we study this behavior using a coarse grained molecular dynamics simulation approach. Coarse…
This work focuses on planar growth-induced instabilities in three-dimensional bilayer structures, i.e., thick stiff film on a compliant substrate. Growth-induced instabilities are examined for a different range of fiber stiffness with a…
Active processes in living systems generate nonequilibrium forces that deform embedded passive macromolecules. To understand how such dynamics influence polymer conformation, we study a flexible passive chain in an active nematic fluid.…
When a flexible filament is confined to a fluid interface, the balance between capillary attraction, bending resistance, and tension from an external source can lead to a self-buckling instability. We perform an analysis of this instability…
We report on a computational study of the statics and dynamics of long flexible linear polymers that spontaneously knot and unknot. Specifically, the equilibrium self-entanglement properties, such as the knotting probability, knot length…
We present a systematic statistical mechanical analysis of the conformational properties of a stiff polyelectrolyte chain with intrachain attractions that are due to counterion correlations. We show that the mean-field solution corresponds…
The paper deals with the interaction between buckling and resonance instabilities of mechanical systems. Taking into account the effect of geometric nonlinearity in the equations of motion through the geometric stiffness matrix, the problem…
We investigate the dynamics and the pathways of the collapse of a single, semiflexible polymer in a poor solvent via 3-D Brownian Dynamics simulations. Earlier work indicates that the condensation of semiflexible polymers generically…
Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a…