Related papers: Virus shapes and buckling transitions in spherical…
The protein folding problem must ultimately be solved on all length scales from the atomic up through a hierarchy of complicated structures. By analyzing the stability of the folding process using physics and mathematics, this paper shows…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
Thin solids often develop elastic instabilities and subsequently complex, multiscale deformation patterns. Revealing the organizing principles of this spatial complexity has ramifications for our understanding of morphogenetic processes in…
We develop a perturbation theory to study the shape and the orientation of an initially spherical capsule of radius R with a viscosity contrast, a surface tension {\sigma} and a bending rigidity $\kappa$ in linear flows. The elastic…
The wrapping of particles and vesicles by lipid bilayer membranes is a fundamental process in cellular transport and targeted drug delivery. Here, we investigate the wrapping behavior of nonspherical vesicles, such as ellipsoidal, prolate,…
Growth-induced instabilities are ubiquitous in biological systems and lead to diverse morphologies in the form of wrinkling, folding, and creasing. The current work focusses on the mechanics behind growth-induced wrinkling instabilities in…
The isostatic jamming limit of frictionless spherical particles from Edwards' statistical mechanics [Song \emph{et al.}, Nature (London) {\bf 453}, 629 (2008)] is generalized to arbitrary dimension $d$ using a liquid-state description. The…
By means of contact dynamics simulations, we investigate a dense packing composed of polyhedral particles under quasistatic shearing. The effect of particle shape is analyzed by comparing the polyhedra packing with a packing of similar…
The effects of particle roughness and short-ranged non-central forces on colloidal gels are studied using computer simulations in which particles experience a sinusoidal variation in energy as they rotate. The number of minima $n$ and…
We investigate the static and dynamic properties of a weakly polydisperse hard sphere system in the deeply supercooled state, i.e. at densities higher than that corresponding to the mode-coupling transition. The structural analysis reveals…
We study the optimal packing of short, hard spherocylinders confined to lie tangential to a spherical surface, using simulated annealing and molecular dynamics simulations. For clusters of up to twelve particles, we map out the changes in…
Experiments have investigated shape changes of polymer films induced by asymmetric swelling by a chemical vapor. Inspired by recent work on the shaping of elastic sheets by non-Euclidean metrics [Y. Klein, E. Efrati, and E. Sharon, Science…
Two-dimensional (2D) mechanical models of confluent tissues have related the mechanical state of a monolayer of cells to the average perimeter length of the cell cross sections, predicting floppiness or rigidity of the material. For the…
It is known that the famous theoretical formula by Koiter for the critical buckling load of circular cylindrical shells under axial compression does not coincide with the experimental data. Namely, while Koiter's formula predicts linear…
Results from molecular dynamics simulations of simple, structured particles capable of self-assembling into polyhedral shells are described. The analysis focuses on the growth histories of individual shells in the presence of an explicit…
Cells offer numerous inspiring examples where proteins and membranes combine to form complex structures that are key to intracellular compartmentalization, cargo transport, and specialization of cell morphology. Despite this wealth of…
We present a method for discovering dense packings of general convex hard particles and apply it to study the dense packing behavior of a one-parameter family of particles with tetrahedral symmetry representing a deformation of the ideal…
We study dipole-mode and scissors-mode oscillations of a harmonically-trapped dipolar supersolid, composed of dipolar droplets arranged on a one-dimensional (1D) or a two-dimensional (2D) lattice, to establish the robustness of its…
The shape assumed by a slender elastic structure is a function both of the geometry of the space in which it exists and the forces it experiences. We explore by experiments and theoretical analysis, the morphological phase-space of a…
We present the results from a numerical investigation using the finite element method to study the buckling strength of near-perfect spherical shells containing a single, localized, Gaussian-dimple defect whose profile is systematically…