Muscle as a meta-material operating near a critical point

Abstract

Passive mechanical response of skeletal muscles at fast time scales is dominated by long range interactions inducing cooperative behavior without breaking the detailed balance. This leads to such unusual "material properties" as negative equilibrium stiffness and different behavior in force and displacement controlled loading conditions. Our fitting of experimental data suggests that "muscle material" is finely tuned to perform close to a critical point which explains large fluctuations observed in muscles close to the stall force.

Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

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• Paramagnetic response of muscle-type systems
• Statistical mechanics of the Huxley-Simmons model
• Mechanics of collective unfolding
• Thermal control of nucleation and propagation transition stresses in discrete lattices with non-local interactions and non-convex energy
• Pseudo energy wells in active systems
• Functionality of disorder in muscle mechanics
• Protein unfolding and refolding as transitions through virtual states
• Passive viscoelastic response of striated muscles
• A plausible mechanism of muscle stabilization in stall conditions
• The elasticity of semiflexible polymers with reversible spontaneous curvature in two dimensions