Related papers: Stretching short biopolymers by fields and forces
Long linear polymers in a depinned interfaces environment have been studied for a long time, for instance in \cite{Caravenna2009depinning} when the temperature is constant. In this paper, we study an extension of this model by making the…
We study the static properties of a semiflexible polymer exposed to a quenched random environment by means of computer simulations. The polymer is modeled as two-dimensional Heisenberg chain. For the random environment we consider hard…
Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…
The probability that a randomly accelerated particle in two dimensions has not yet left a simply connected domain ${\cal A}$ after a time $t$ decays as $e^{-E_0t}$ for long times. The same quantity $E_0$ also determines the confinement free…
Linear polymers are represented as chains of hopping reptons and their motion is described as a stochastic process on a lattice. This admittedly crude approximation still catches essential physics of polymer motion, i.e. the universal…
The flow behavior of a semiflexible polymer in microchannels is studied using Multiparticle Collision Dynamics (MPC), a particle-based hydrodynamic simulation technique. Conformations, distributions, and radial cross-streamline migration…
The correlations between the segments of a semidilute polymer solution are found to induce correlations in the positions of small particles added to the solution. Small means a diameter much less than the polymer's correlation length. In…
We consider forces acting on objects immersed in, or attached to, long fluctuating polymers. The confinement of the polymer by the obstacles results in polymer-mediated forces that can be repulsive (due to loss of entropy) or attractive (if…
We consider edge effects in grafted polymer layers under compression. For a semi-infinite brush, the penetration depth of edge effects $\xi\propto h_0(h_0/h)^{1/2}$ is larger than the natural height $h_0$ and the actual height $h$. For a…
We investigate the pseudo-Casimir force in a slab of material composed of nematically ordered long polymers. We write the total mesoscopic energy together with the constraint connecting the local density and director fluctuations and…
The process of force generation by the growth of biopolymers is simulated via a Langevin-dynamics approach. The interaction forces are taken to have simple forms that favor the growth of straight fibers from solution. The force-velocity…
The transport of deformable particles through porous media underlies a wealth of applications ranging from filtration to oil recovery to the transport and spreading of biological agents. Using direct numerical simulations, we analyze the…
Within the cell, biopolymers are often situated in constrained, fluid environments, e.g., cytoskeletal networks, stretched DNAs in chromatin. It is of paramount importance to understand quantitatively how they, utilizing their flexibility,…
Previous research on semiflexible polymers including cytoskeletal networks in cells has suggested the existence of distinct regimes of elastic response, in which the strain field is either uniform (affine) or non-uniform (non-affine) under…
We investigate possible shapes of the electric field, which oscillating dipoles in a certain region of biological tissue can produce in a neighboring region, or outside the tissue boundaries. We find that a wide range of shapes, including…
The endpoint distribution and dynamics of semiflexible fibers is studied by numerical simulation. A brief overview is given over the analytical theory of flexible and semiflexible polymers. In particular, a closed expression is given for…
The aim of this work is understanding the stretching mechanism of stochastic models of turbulence acting on a simple model of dilute polymers. We consider a turbulent model that is white noise in time and activates frequencies in a shell…
The effect of confinement in the segmental relaxation of polymers is considered. On the basis of a thermodynamic model we discuss the emerging relevance of the fast degrees of freedom in stimulating the much slower segmental relaxation, as…
Polymers exposed to shear flow exhibit a rich tumbling dynamics. While rigid rods rotate on Jeffery orbits, flexible polymers stretch and coil up during tumbling. Theoretical results show that in both of these asymptotic regimes the…
A directed polymer is allowed to branch, with configurations determined by global energy optimization and disorder. A finite size scaling analysis in 2D shows that, if disorder makes branching more and more favorable, a critical transition…