Related papers: Untwisting of a Strained Cholesteric Elastomer by …
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
The base pair fluctuations and helix untwisting are examined for a circular molecule. A realistic mesoscopic model including twisting degrees of freedom and bending of the molecular axis is proposed. The computational method, based on path…
A nonlinear model representing the tribological problem of a thin solid lubricant layer between two sliding periodic surfaces is used to analyze the phenomenon of hysteresis at pinning/depinning around a moving state rather than around a…
The ground state of chromonic liquid crystals, as revealed by a number of recent experiments, is quite different from that of ordinary nematic liquid crystals: it is twisted instead of uniform. The common explanation provided for this state…
Mechanical stresses are increasingly found to be associated with various biological functionalities. At the same time, topological defects are being identified across a diverse range of biological systems and are points of localized…
A DNA-protein complex modelled by a semiflexible chain and an attractive spherical core is studied in the situation when an external stretching force is acting on one end monomer of the chain while the other end monomer is kept fixed in…
Constitutive modeling of dielectric elastomers has been of long standing interest in mechanics. Over the last two decades rigorous constitutive models have been developed that couple the electrical response of these polymers with large…
Nucleic acids are highly deformable helical molecules constantly stretched, twisted and bent in their biological functioning. Single molecule experiments have shown that double stranded (ds)-RNA and standard ds-DNA have opposite…
We describe a phase transition that gives rise to structurally non-trivial states in a two-dimensional ordered network of particles connected by harmonic bonds. Monte Carlo simulations reveal that the network supports, apart from the…
This work introduces a methodology for the statistical mechanical analysis of polymeric chains under tension controlled by optical or magnetic tweezers at thermal equilibrium with an embedding fluid medium. The response of single bonds…
This study presents a Eulerian theory to elucidate the molecular kinematics in polymer networks and their connection to continuum deformation, grounded in fundamental statistical physics and thermodynamics. Three key innovations are…
Using tools and concepts from contact topology we show that non-vanishing twist implies conservation of the layer structure in cholesteric liquid crystals. This leads to a number of additional topological invariants for cholesteric…
We investigate the mechanisms of histone sliding and detachment with a stochastic model that couples thermally-induced, passive histone sliding with active motor-driven histone unwrapping. Analysis of a passive loop or twist defect-mediated…
Elastic effects in a model of disordered nematic elastomers are numerically investigated in two dimensions. Networks crosslinked in the isotropic phase exhibit unusual soft mechanical response against stretching. It arises from gradual…
We study the influence of some quenched disorder in the sequence of monomers on the entropic elasticity of long polymeric chains. Starting from the Kratky-Porod model, we show numerically that some randomness in the favoured angles between…
Stress relaxation following deformation of an entangled polymeric liquid is thought to be affected by transient reforming of chain entanglements. In this work, we use single molecule techniques to study the relaxation of individual polymers…
We employ a first principles, force-level approach to self-consistently construct the anharmonic tube confinement field for entangled fluids of rigid needles and for primitive-path (PP) level chains in two limiting situations where chain…
We propose a framework to model elastic properties of polycrystals by coupling crystal orientational degrees of freedom with elastic strains. Our model encodes crystal symmetries and takes into account explicitly the strain compatibility…
Addressing the intricate challenges in plane elasticity, especially with non-vanishing traction and complex geometries, requires innovative methods. This paper offers a novel approach, drawing inspiration from the Neumann problem for the…
This paper presents a macroscopic theory, alongside its numerical implementation, aimed at describing, explaining, and predicting the nucleation and propagation of fracture in viscoelastic materials subjected to quasistatic loading…