The equilibrium fluctuations of a semiflexible filament cross linked into a network
arXiv:1909.02033 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.101.012408
Abstract
We examine the equilibrium fluctuation spectrum of a constituent semiflexible filament segment in a network. The effect of this cross linking is to modify the mechanical boundary conditions at the end of the filament. We consider the effect of both tensile stress in the network, and its elastic compliance. Most significantly, the network's compliance introduces a nonlinear term into the filament Hamiltonian even in the small-bending approximation. We analyze the effect of this nonlinearity upon the filament's fluctuation profile. We also find that there are three principal fluctuation regimes dominated by one of the following: (i) network tension, (ii) filament bending stiffness, or (iii) network compliance. We propose that one can use observed filament fluctuations as a noninvasive probe of network tension, and we provide the necessary response function to quantitatively analyze this sort of "tension microrheology" in cross linked semiflexible filament networks.
10 pages, 8 figures
References in corpus (16)
- The hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms
- Nonlinear Elasticity in Biological Gels
- Elasticity of Semiflexible Biopolymer Networks
- Modeling semiflexible polymer networks
- Microscopic Viscoelasticity: Shear Moduli of Soft Materials Determined from Thermal Fluctuations
- Elasticity of Stiff Polymer Networks
- Determining Microscopic Viscoelasticity in Flexible and Semiflexible Polymer Networks from Thermal Fluctuations
- Deformation of crosslinked semiflexible polymer networks
- Nonaffine rubber elasticity for stiff polymer networks
- Effective medium theory of semiflexible filamentous networks
- Nonlinear effective medium theory of disordered spring networks
- Tension dynamics in semiflexible polymers. Part I: Coarse-grained equations of motion
- Tension dynamics in semiflexible polymers. Part II: Scaling solutions and applications
- Tension dynamics and viscoelasticity of extensible wormlike chains
- Monomer dynamics of a wormlike chain
- Coupling of transverse and longitudinal response in stiff polymers