The Glassy Wormlike Chain

Abstract

We introduce a new model for the dynamics of a wormlike chain in an environment that gives rise to a rough free energy landscape, which we baptise the glassy wormlike chain. It is obtained from the common wormlike chain by an exponential stretching of the relaxation spectrum of its long-wavelength eigenmodes, controlled by a single stretching parameter. Predictions for pertinent observables such as the dynamic structure factor and the microrheological susceptibility exhibit the characteristics of soft glassy rheology and compare favourably with experimental data for reconstituted cytoskeletal networks and live cells. We speculate about the possible microscopic origin of the stretching, implications for the nonlinear rheology, and the potential physiological significance of our results.

12 pages, 8 figures. Minor corrections

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• The Role of Stickiness in the Rheology of Semiflexible Polymers
• Viscoelasticity of reversibly crosslinked networks of semiflexible polymers
• Stress relaxation through crosslink unbinding in cytoskeletal networks
• Dynamic structure factor of a stiff polymer in a glassy solution
• A minimal model for the inelastic mechanics of biopolymer networks and cells
• Rheology of fractal networks
• Influence of lattice disorder on the structure of persistent polymer chains
• Effect of Serum Starvation on Rheology of Cell Monolayers
• Nonlinear master relation in microscopic mechanical response of semiflexible biopolymer networks
• Viscoelastic scaling regimes for marginally-rigid fractal spring networks