publications

Lenz Martin 1 Physical Review X, 2014, 4, pp.041002 Movement within eukaryotic cells largely originates from localized forces exerted by myosin motors on scaffolds of actin filaments. Although individual motors locally exert both contractile and extensile forces, large actomyosin structures at the cellular scale are overwhelmingly contractile, suggesting that the scaffold serves to favor contraction […]

H. H. Wensink 1 E. Trizac 2 Journal of Chemical Physics, American Institute of Physics (AIP), 2014, 140, pp.024901 The implications of soft ‘patchy’ interactions on the orientational disorder-order transition of strongly elongated colloidal rods and flat disks is studied within a simple Onsager-van der Waals density functional theory. The theory provides a generic framework

Vincent Démery 1 Laurent Ponson 1 Alberto Rosso 2 Europhysics Letters, EDP Science, 2014, 105, pp.34003 The relevant parameters at the microstructure scale that govern the macroscopic toughness of disordered brittle materials are investigated theoretically. We focus on planar crack propagation and describe the front evolution as the propagation of a long-range elastic line within

Nils Haug 1 Sergei Nechaev 2, 3, 4 Mikhail Tamm 4, 5 Journal of Statistical Mechanics, 2014, pp.P10013 Using the generalized normally ordered form of words in a locally-free group of $n$ generators, we show that in the limit $n\to\infty$, the partition function of weighted directed lattice animals on a semi-infinite strip coincides with the

Patrick Charbonneau 1, 2 Jorge Kurchan 3 Giorgio Parisi 4, 5 Pierfrancesco Urbani 6, 7 Francesco Zamponi 2 Nature Communications, Nature Publishing Group, 2014, 5, pp.3725. 〈10.1038/ncomms4725〉 Glasses are amorphous solids whose constituent particles are caged by their neighbors and thus cannot flow. This sluggishness is often ascribed to the free energy landscape containing multiple

Kabir Ramola 1 Christophe Texier 1 Journal of Statistical Physics, Springer Verlag (Germany), 2014, 157, pp.497-514 We study the fluctuations of certain random matrix products $\Pi_N=M_N\cdots M_2M_1$ of $\mathrm{SL}(2,\mathbb{R})$, describing localisation properties of the one-dimensional Dirac equation with random mass. In the continuum limit, i.e. when matrices $M_n$’s are close to the identity matrix, we

L. Cerino 1 G. Gradenigo 2, 3 A. Sarracino 2, 4, 5 D. Villamaina 2 A. Vulpiani 6, 7 Physical Review E, American Physical Society, 2014, 89, pp.042105 We study the behavior of a moving wall in contact with a particle gas and subjected to an external force. We compare the fluctuations of the system

Shamik Gupta 1 Satya N. Majumdar 1 Gregory Schehr 1 Physical Review Letters, American Physical Society, 2014, 112, pp.220601 We study one-dimensional fluctuating interfaces of length $L$ where the interface stochastically resets to a fixed initial profile at a constant rate $r$. For finite $r$ in the limit $L \to \infty$, the system settles into

Lukasz Kusmierz 1, 2 Satya N. Majumdar 3 Sanjib Sabhapandit 4 Gregory Schehr 3 Physical Review Letters, American Physical Society, 2014, 113, pp.220602 We study analytically an intermittent search process in one dimension. There is an immobile target at the origin and a searcher undergoes a discrete time jump process starting at $x_0\geq0$, where successive

A. A. Banishev 1 J. Wagner 1 T. Emig 2 R. Zandi 1 U. Mohideen 1 Physical Review B (Condensed Matter), American Physical Society, 2014, 89, pp.235436 In the current work we present the complete results for the measurement of normal Casimir force between shallow and smooth sinusoidally corrugated gold coated sphere and a plate