相关论文: Maximally Stiffening Composites Require Maximally …
Composites of flexible and rigid polymers are ubiquitous in biology and industry alike, yet the physical principles determining their mechanical properties are far from understood. Here, we couple force spectroscopy with large-scale…
The mechanics of complex soft matter often cannot be understood in the classical physical frame of flexible polymers or rigid rods. The underlying constituents are semiflexible polymers, whose finite bending stiffness ($\kappa$) leads to…
We investigate the damping enhancement in a class of biomimetic staggered composites via a combination of design, modeling, and experiment. In total, three kinds of staggered composites are designed by mimicking the structure of bone and…
The folding transition of biopolymers from the coil to compact structures has attracted wide research interest in the past and is well studied in polymer physics. Recent seminal works on DNA in confined devices have shown that these long…
Mixtures of polymers of varying topologies and stiffnesses display complex emergent rheological properties that often cannot be predicted from their single-component counterparts. For example, entangled blends of ring and linear polymers…
Entangled networks of stiff biopolymers exhibit complex dynamic response, emerging from the topological constraints that neighboring filaments impose upon each other. We propose a class of reference models for entanglement dynamics of stiff…
Nanoscale polymeric thin films are widely used in diverse applications such as energy devices, flexible electronics and biosensors, where a satisfactory mechanical performance is of vital importance to realize their full functionality. It…
Blends of polymers of different topologies, such as ring and supercoiled, naturally occur in biology and often exhibit emergent viscoelastic properties coveted in industry. However, due to their complexity, along with the difficulty of…
The question of how stiff polymers are able to pack into small containers is particularly relevant to the study of DNA packaging in viruses. A reduced version of the problem based on coarse-grained representations of the main components of…
We study the compression and extension dynamics of a DNA-like polymer interacting with non-DNA binding and DNA-binding proteins, by means of computer simulations. The geometry we consider is inspired by recent experiments probing the…
We present a statistical mechanical study of stiff polymers, motivated by experiments on actin filaments and the considerable current interest in polymer networks. We obtain simple, approximate analytical forms for the force-extension…
Single-filament tracing has been a valuable tool to directly determine geometrical and mechanical properties of entangled polymer networks. However, systematically verifying how the stiffness of the tracer filament or its molecular…
Soft composite solids are made of inclusions dispersed within soft matrices. They are ubiquitous in nature and form the basis of many biological tissues. In the field of materials science, synthetic soft composites are promising candidates…
Natural materials often feature a combination of soft and stiff phases, arranged to achieve excellent mechanical properties, such as high strength and toughness. Many natural materials have even independently evolved to have similar…
Polymer fibers consist of macromolecules oriented along the fiber axis. Better alignment of chains leads to an increased strength of the fiber. It is believed that the key factor preventing formation of a perfectly oriented fiber is…
Soft composite solids, comprising discrete inclusions embedded within a compliant matrix, are emerging candidates for engineering synthetic tissues and soft robotic materials. Current strategies for controlling their nonlinear mechanics,…
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…
Entangled ring polymers, along with blends of ring and linear polymers, continue to be a topic of great interest and debate due to the conflicting experimental results in the literature as well as the difficulty of producing entangled…
DNA-coated particles are promising as building blocks for functional and finite-sized assemblies because they can be programmed with orthogonal interactions owing to the sequence-specific hybridization of DNA strands. To fully exploit this…
We study the mechanical stiffening behavior in two-dimensional (2D) cross-linked networks of semiflexible biopolymer filaments under simple shear. Filamental constituents immersed in a fluid undergo thermally excited bending motions.…