Related papers: Creep motion of an elastic string in a random pote…
Pinning and thermal creep determine the response of numerous systems containing superstructures, e.g., vortices in type II superconductors, domain walls in ferroics, or dislocations in metals. The combination of drive and thermal…
We report the simultaneous characterization of time- and force-dependent mechanical properties of adherent cells in the physiologically relevant regime of large forces. We used magnetic tweezers to apply forces to magnetic beads bound to…
The dynamics of a crack propagating in an elastic inhomogeneous material is investigated. The variations of the average crack velocity with the external loading are measured for a brittle rock and are shown to display two distinct regimes:…
The characterization of the transverse structure of the QCD string is discussed. We formulate a conjecture as to how the stress-energy tensor of the underlying gauge theory couples to the string degrees of freedom. A consequence of the…
We consider two complementary polymer strands of length $L$ attached by a common end monomer. The two strands bind through complementary monomers and at low temperatures form a double stranded conformation (zipping), while at high…
The 2-D Peskin problem describes a 1-D closed elastic string immersed and moving in a 2-D Stokes flow that is induced by its own elastic force. The geometric shape of the string and its internal stretching configuration evolve in a coupled…
We study the effects of friction on the scaling evolution of string networks in condensed matter and cosmological contexts. We derive a generalized `one-scale' model with the string correlation length $L$ and velocity $v$ as dynamical…
We study computationally the creep and yielding of athermal gels and fibre network materials under a constant imposed shear stress, within a minimal model of interconnected filaments with central forces in $d=2$ spatial dimensions. Each…
We study the creep dynamics of a two-dimensional interface driven through a periodic potential using dynamical renormalization group methods. We find that the nature of weak-drive transport depends qualitatively on whether the temperature…
Crumpled paper or drapery patterns are everyday examples of how elastic sheets can respond to external forcing. In this Letter, we study experimentally a novel sort of forcing. We consider a circular flexible plate clamped at its center and…
We examine the focusing of kinetic energy and the amplification of various quantities during the snapping motion of the free end of a flexible structure. This brief but violent event appears to be a regularized finite-time singularity, with…
Rotating the clamped ends of a buckled elastica induces a snap-through instability. Predicting the limit point and determining the equilibria at the start and end of the snap are routine computations in the quasi-static setting. The…
We investigate numerically the dynamics of crack propagation along a weak plane using a model consisting of fibers connecting a soft and a hard clamp. This bottom-up model has previously been shown to contain the competition of two crack…
An elastic rod, straight in its undeformed state, has a mass attached at one end and a variable length, due to a constraint at the other end by a frictionless sliding sleeve. The constraint is arranged with the sliding direction parallel to…
We investigate the emergence of the continuum elastic limit from the atomistic description of matter at zero temperature considering how locally defined elastic quantities depend on the coarse graining length scale. Results obtained…
Disordered systems such as spin glasses have been used extensively as models for high-dimensional random landscapes and studied from the perspective of optimization algorithms. In a recent paper by L. Addario-Berry and the second author,…
We study the dynamical aspects of a statistical-mechanical model for fracture of heterogeneous media: the fiber bundle model with various interaction range. Although the model does not include any thermal activation process, the system…
Recent experiments [Jo et al., Science 325, 1521 (2009)] have presented evidence of ferromagnetic correlations in a two-component ultracold Fermi gas with strong repulsive interactions. Motivated by these experiments we consider spin drag,…
The thermal rounding of the depinning transition of an elastic interface sliding on a washboard potential is studied through analytic arguments and very accurate numerical simulations. We confirm the standard view that well below the…
It is shown that a compound elastic structure, which displays a dynamic instability, may be designed as the union (or 'fusion') of two structures which are stable when separately analyzed. The compound elastic structure has two degrees of…