Related papers: Anisotropic and Heterogeneous Polymerized Membrane…
We describe the statistical behavior of anisotropic crystalline membranes. In particular we give the phase diagram and critical exponents for phantom membranes and discuss the generalization to self-avoiding membranes.
A theoretical study of vesicles of topological genus zero is presented. The bilayer membranes forming the vesicles have various degrees of intrinsic (tangent-plane) orientational order, ranging from smectic to hexatic, frustrated by…
A systematic investigation is presented of grain boundaries and grain boundary networks in two dimensional flexible membranes with crystalline order. An isolated grain boundary undergoes a buckling transition at a critical value of the…
The biological membrane, which compartmentalizes the cell and its organelles, exhibit wide variety of macroscopic shapes of varying morphology and topology. A systematic understanding of the relation of membrane shapes to composition,…
Membrane shape fluctuations induce attractive interactions between rigid inclusions. Previous analytical studies showed that the fluctuation-induced pair interactions are rather small compared to thermal energies, but also that multi-body…
Thermal fluctuations strongly modify the large length-scale elastic behavior of crosslinked membranes, giving rise to scale-dependent elastic moduli. While thermal effects in flat membranes are well understood, many natural and artificial…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
A phase-field model for dealing with dynamic instabilities in membranes is presented. We use it to study curvature-driven pearling instability in vesicles induced by the anchorage of amphiphilic polymers on the membrane. Within this model,…
We study the dynamics of polymers and elastic manifolds in non potential static random flows. We find that barriers are generated from combined effects of elasticity, disorder and thermal fluctuations. This leads to glassy trapping even in…
From the perspective of physical properties, the cell membrane is an exotic two-dimensional material that has a dual nature: it exhibits characteristics of fluids, i.e., lipid molecules show lateral diffusion, while also demonstrating…
One dramatic feature of network liquids is the emergence at low temperatures and high pressures of polyamorphism, where multiple distinct liquid phases are accessed in a single material. Polyamorphism can arise from the competition between…
Bulk glass formation occurs over a very small part of phase space, and "good" glasses (which form even at low quench rates ~ 10K/sec) select an even smaller part of that accessible phase space. An axiomatic theory provides the physical…
Dynamical heterogeneities -- strong fluctuations near the glass transition -- are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One possible hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft…
Glass-forming liquids display strong fluctuations -- dynamical heterogeneities -- near their glass transition. By numerically simulating a binary Weeks-Chandler-Andersen liquid and varying both temperature and timescale, we investigate the…
Motivated by recent experiments on biomimetic membranes exposed to several aqueous phases, we theoretically study the morphology of a membrane in contact with a liquid droplet formed via aqueous phase separation. We concentrate on membranes…
We present the first measurements of anisotropic statistical fluctuations in perfectly homogeneous turbulent flows. We address both problems of intermittency in anisotropic sectors and hierarchical ordering of anisotropies on a direct…
An accurate description of the structure and dynamics of interfacial water is essential for phospholipid membranes, since it determines their function and their interaction with other molecules. Here we consider water confined in stacked…
We test a hypothesis for the origin of dynamical heterogeneity in slowly relaxing systems, namely that it emerges from soft (Goldstone) modes associated with a broken continuous symmetry under time reparametrizations. We do this by…
We review a model--based rather than phenomenological approach to low--temperature anomalies in glasses. Specifically, we present a solvable model inspired by spin--glass theory that exhibits both, a glassy low--temperature phase, and a…
We have studied the pearling instability induced on hollow tubular lipid vesicles by hydrophilic polymers with hydrophobic side groups along the backbone. The results show that the polymer concentration is coupled to local membrane…