Related papers: Rupture of multiple parallel molecular bonds under…
According to the 'old view', proteins fold along well-defined sequential pathways, whereas the 'new view' sees protein folding as a highly parallel stochastic process on funnel-shaped energy landscapes. We have analyzed parallel and…
Motivated by recent advances in single molecule manipulation techniques that enabled several groups to tie knots in individual polymer strands and to monitor their dynamics, we have used computer simulations to study "friction knots"…
Mechanically induced folding of passive cross-linkers is a fundamental biological phenomenon. A typical example is a conformational change in myosin II responsible for the power-stroke in skeletal muscles. In this paper we present an…
Multifragmentation is the dominant decay mode of heavy nuclear systems with excitation energies near their binding energies and is characterized by a multiple production of nuclear fragments with intermediate mass. At relativistic…
Tight binding molecular dynamics simulations, with a non orthogonal basis set, are performed to study the fragmentation of carbon fullerenes doped with up to six silicon atoms. Both substitutional and adsorbed cases are considered. The…
Motivated by rolling adhesion of white blood cells in the vasculature, we study how cells move in linear shear flow above a wall to which they can adhere via specific receptor-ligand bonds. Our computer simulations are based on a Langevin…
We investigate by Molecular-Dynamics simulations the fast mobility - the rattling amplitude of the particles temporarily trapped by the cage of the neighbors - in mildly supercooled states of dense molecular (linear trimers) and atomic…
We investigate the failure mechanisms of load sharing complex systems. The system is composed of multiple nodes or components whose failures are determined based on the interaction of their respective strengths and loads (or capacity and…
Cytoskeletal filaments are capable of self-assembly in the absence of externally supplied chemical energy, but the rapid turnover rates essential for their biological function require a constant flux of ATP or GTP hydrolysis. The same is…
Associative polymer networks have shown a major promise in fabrication of self-healing and responsive materials. The can also serve as simple models to study more complex biological systems where transient interactions play an important…
The fracture and severing of polymer chains plays a critical role in the failure of fibrous materials and the regulated turnover of intracellular filaments. Using continuum wormlike chain models, we investigate the fracture of semiflexible…
We illuminate the many-body effects underlying the structure, formation, and dissolution of cellular adhesion domains in the presence and absence of forces. We consider mixed Glauber-Kawasaki dynamics of a two-dimensional model of…
Event-driven molecular dynamics simulations are carried out on two rigid body systems which differ in the symmetry of their molecular mass distributions. First, simulations of methane in which the molecules interact via discontinuous…
Picking up, laying down, colliding, rolling, and peeling are partial-contact interactions involving moving discontinuities. We examine the balances of momentum and energy across a moving discontinuity in a string, with allowance for…
Under an applied external load the global load-sharing fiber bundle model, with individual fiber strength thresholds sampled randomly from a probability distribution, will relax to an equilibrium state, or to complete bundle breakdown. The…
Common experience tells us that a knot significantly weakens the polymer strand in which it is tied, which in turn leads to more facile chain rupture under tensile loading. Using first-principles molecular dynamics calculations we describe…
The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such…
Network robustness is a central point in network science, both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. In this paper, we show that layer degradation, understood as the continuous or discrete loss of links' weight, triggers a…
Recently, we have experimentally demonstrated a continuous loading mechanism for an optical dipole trap from a guided atomic beam [1]. The observed evolution of the number of atoms and temperature in the trap are consequences of the unusual…
A general framework for performing event-driven simulations of systems with semi-flexible or rigid bodies interacting under impulsive torques and forces is outlined. Two different approaches are presented. In the first, the dynamics and…