Confotronic Dynamics of Tubular Lattices

Abstract

Tubular lattices are ubiquitous in nature and technology. Microtubules and nanotubes of all kinds act as important pillars of biological cells and the man-made nano-world. We show that when prestress is introduced in such structures, localized conformational quasiparticles emerge and govern the collective shape dynamics of the lattice. When coupled via cooperative interactions these quasiparticles form larger-scale quasipolymer superstructures exhibiting collective dynamic modes and giving rise to a hallmark behavior radically different from semiflexible beams.

References in corpus (6)

• Elastic properties of grafted microtubules
• Microtubule dynamics depart from wormlike chain model
• Interface mediated interactions between particles -- a geometrical approach
• Indirect interactions of membrane-adsorbed cylinders
• Geometry of surface mediated interactions
• Discrete elastic model for stretching-induced flagellar polymorphs