Related papers: Nonlinear Elasticity in Biological Gels
A confined incompressible elastic film does not deform uniformly when subjected to adhesive interfacial stresses but with undulations which have a characteristic wavelength scaling linearly with the thickness of the film. In the classical…
A hydrostatically stressed soft elastic film circumvents the imposed constraint by undergoing a morphological instability, the wavelength of which is dictated by the minimization of the surface and the elastic strain energies of the film.…
Twisted and rope-like assemblies of filamentous molecules are common and vital structural elements in cells and tissue of living organisms. We study the intrinsic frustration occurring in these materials between the two-dimensional…
A long standing puzzle in the rheology of living cells is the origin of the experimentally observed long time stress relaxation. The mechanics of the cell is largely dictated by the cytoskeleton, which is a biopolymer network consisting of…
In this paper we study the elastic response of synthetic hydrogels to an applied shear stress. The hydrogels studied here have previously been shown to mimic the behaviour of biopolymer networks when they are sufficiently far above the gel…
Modeling liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) at the molecular level is crucial for the predictable design of energy-conversion and stimuli-responsive materials. Here, we develop a self-consistent field theory for LCEs which captures the…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
Non-Euclidean plates are a subset of the class of elastic bodies having no stress-free configuration. Such bodies exhibit residual stress when relaxed from all external constraints, and may assume complicated equilibrium shapes even in the…
Stress-strain relations for random packings of entangling chains under triaxial compression can exhibit strain stiffening and sustain stresses several orders-of-magnitude beyond typical granular materials. X-ray tomography reveals the…
Living tissues show an extraordinary adaptiveness to strain, which is crucial for their proper biological functioning. The physical origin of this mechanical behaviour has been widely investigated using reconstituted networks of collagen…
In complex crystals close to melting or at finite temperatures, different types of defects are ubiquitous and their role becomes relevant in the mechanical response of these solids. Conventional elasticity theory fails to provide a…
The three-dimensional shapes of thin lamina such as leaves, flowers, feathers, wings etc, are driven by the differential strain induced by the relative growth. The growth takes place through variations in the Riemannian metric, given on the…
We investigate the system size dependent rheological response of branched type I collagen gels. When subjected to a shear strain, the highly interconnected mesh dynamically reorients, resulting in overall stiffening of the network. When a…
The mechanical properties of the cell depend crucially on the tension of its cytoskeleton, a biopolymer network that is put under stress by active motor proteins. While the fibrous nature of the network is known to strongly affect the…
What can cells gain by using disordered, rather than folded, proteins in the architecture of their skeleton? Disordered proteins take multiple co-existing conformations, and often contain segments which act as random-walk-shaped polymers.…
Slow dynamic nonlinearity describes a poorly understood, creep-like phenomena that occurs in brittle composite materials such as rocks and cement. It is characterized by a drop in stiffness induced by a mechanical conditioning, followed by…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
The structural properties of a linear polymer and its evolution in time have a strong bearing on its anisotropic stress response. The mean-square bond length and mean bond angle are the critical parameters that influence the time-varying…
Recent studies in mammalian hearts show that left ventricular wall thickening is an important mechanism for systolic ejection and that during contraction the cardiac muscle develops significant stresses in the muscular cross-fiber…
Elastin is a structural protein with outstanding mechanical properties (e.g., elasticity and resilience) and biologically relevant functions (e.g., triggering responses like cell adhesion or chemotaxis). It is formed from its precursor…