Related papers: Entanglement, elasticity and viscous relaxation of…
Conflicting experimental results have been reported for the plateau modulus in actin solutions: Analogies are often made with the viscoelastic behaviour of flexible polymers making use of the idea of entanglement as the source of the…
Brownian dynamics simulations are used to study highly entangled solutions of semiflexible polymers. Bending fluctuations of semiflexible rods are signficantly affected by entanglement only above a concentration $c^{**}$, where $c^{**}\sim…
By combining molecular dynamics simulations and topological analyses with scaling arguments, we obtain analytic expressions that quantitatively predict the entanglement length $N_e$, the plateau modulus $G$, and the tube diameter $a$ in…
We study the viscoelastic properties of highly entangled, flexible, self-propelled polymers using Brownian dynamics simulations. Our results show that the active motion of the polymer increases the height of the stress plateau by orders of…
The linear viscoelastic response of flexible polymer solutions in the dilute and semidilute unentangled regimes is investigated using Brownian dynamics simulations. The relaxation modulus and dynamic moduli are computed over a wide range of…
We investigate the viscoelastic properties of entangled networks of semiflexible polymers. At intermediate time scales the elastic response of these networks to shear deformation is described by the plateau modulus $G$. Different scaling…
We present a general theoretical analysis of semiflexible filaments subject to viscous drag or point forcing. These are the relevant forces in dynamic experiments designed to measure biopolymer bending moduli. By analogy with the ``Stokes…
Brownian motion and viscoelasticity of semiflexible polymers is a subject that has been studied for many years. Still, rigorous analysis has been hindered due to the difficulty in handling the constraint that polymer chains cannot be…
Reptation theory has been highly successful in explaining the unusual material properties of entangled polymer solutions. It reduces the complex many-body dynamics to a single-polymer description where each polymer is envisaged to be…
We propose a nonlinear extension of the standard tube model for semidilute solutions of freely-sliding semiflexible polymers. Non-affine filament deformations at the entanglement scale, the renormalisation of direct interactions by thermal…
We review the physical properties of macromolecular networks, consisting of semiflexible polymers such as actin. We start by giving a theoretical analysis of the conformational statistics and mechanical response of single filaments.…
We develop a scaling theory to describe dynamic fluctuations of a semiflexible polymer and find several distinct regimes. We performed simulations to characterize the longitudinal and transverse dynamics; using ensemble averaging for a…
This work investigates the effects of tangent polar activity on the conformational and dynamic properties of entangled polymer melts through Langevin molecular dynamics simulations. We examine systems composed of all self-propelled,…
A number of strange results have been reported for the twist elasticity of a semiflexible filament, actin. In particular dynamic and static methods for determining the torsional twist modulus give very different results. I show here that…
We present a novel method to investigate the dynamics of a single semiflexible polymer, subject to anisotropic friction in a viscous fluid. In contrast to previous approaches, we do not rely on a discrete bead-rod model, but introduce a…
We show using Brownian dynamics simulations and theory how the shear relaxation modulus G(t) of dilute solutions of relatively stiff semiflexible polymers differs qualitatively from that of rigid rods. For chains shorter than their…
We study the viscoelasticity of surface polymer monolayers by measuring the dynamics of thermal concentration fluctuations with surface light scattering. For various systems of proteins and synthetic polymers we find a semi-dilute regime in…
Actin is a filamentary protein which has many remarkable properties making it an ideal system for the study of the dynamics and mechanics of semi-flexible polymer solutions and gels; actin has a persistence length of over 10 microns and can…
The predictions of the polymer mode coupling theory for the finite size corrections to the transport coefficients of entangled polymeric systems are tested in comparisons with various experimental data. It is found that quantitative…
We combine computer simulations and scaling arguments to develop a unified view of polymer entanglement based on the primitive path analysis (PPA) of the microscopic topological state. Our results agree with experimentally measured plateau…