Related papers: Kinks, rings, and rackets in filamentous structure…
The kinetics of the assembly of semiflexible filaments through end-to-end annealing is key to the structure of the cytoskeleton, but is not understood. We analyze this problem through scaling theory and simulations, and uncover a regime…
Mixtures of polymers of varying topologies and stiffnesses display complex emergent rheological properties that often cannot be predicted from their single-component counterparts. For example, entangled blends of ring and linear polymers…
Motivated to understand the behavior of biological filaments interacting with membranes of various types, we study a theoretical model for the shape and thermodynamics of intrinsically-helical filaments bound to curved membranes. We show…
Chirality plays a crucial role in determining the structure of many systems in nature. Twisted or helical aggregates as a consequence of self-assembly can be seen in many biological and synthetic materials. Despite extensive theoretical and…
Topological entanglements are abundant, and often detrimental, in polymeric systems in biology and materials science. Here we theoretically investigate the topological simplification of knots by diffusing slip-links (SLs), which may…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…
We study experimentally and theoretically structural defects which are formed during the transition from a laser cooled cloud to a Coulomb crystal, consisting of tens of ions in a linear radio frequency trap. We demonstrate the creation of…
The Kirchhoff elastic theory of thin filaments with spontaneous curvature is employed in the understanding of the onset of the kink transitions observed in short DNA rings. Dynamical analysis shows that when its actual curvature is less…
Ribbons are a class of slender structures whose length, width, and thickness are widely separated from each other. This scale separation gives a ribbon unusual mechanical properties in athermal macroscopic settings, e.g. it can bend without…
Entangled knots form spontaneously in flexible filaments, yet the influence of the surrounding environment on this process is poorly understood. Here we demonstrate that free-moving particles act as kinetic catalysts for spontaneous…
Mechanically bonded membranes of interlocked ring polymers are a significant generalization of conventional elastic sheets, where connectivity is provided by covalent bonding, and represent a promising class of topological meta-materials.…
In a previous paper, we examined a class of possible conformations for helically patterned filaments in contact with a bonding surface. In particular, we investigated geometries where contact between the pattern and the surface was improved…
In this paper, a selection of elegant, highly symmetric examples of three-periodic tangled nets and filaments are presented. They are constructed via familiar crystal nets using edges as geometric scaffolds for n-fold helical windings.…
We study the equilibrium shapes of vesicles, with an in-plane nematic order, using a Monte-Carlo scheme and show that highly curved shapes, like tubes and discs, with a striking similarity to the structures engendered by certain curvature…
Proteins form a very important class of polymers. In spite of major advances in the understanding of polymer science, the protein problem has remained largely unsolved. Here, we show that a polymer chain viewed as a tube not only captures…
Filamentary structures are ubiquitous in the interstellar medium, yet their formation, internal structure, and longevity have not been studied in detail. We report the results from a comprehensive numerical study that investigates the…
By means of extensive replica-exchange simulations of generic coarse-grained models for helical polymers, we systematically investigate the structural transitions into all possible helical phases for flexible and semiflexible elastic…
When vortex rings collide head-on at high enough Reynolds numbers, they ultimately annihilate through a violent interaction which breaks down their cores into a turbulent cloud. We experimentally show that this very strong interaction,…
The tennis racket effect is a geometric phenomenon which occurs in a free rotation of a three-dimensional rigid body. In a complex phase space, we show that this effect originates from a pole of a Riemann surface and can be viewed as a…
We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…