431 research outputs found
Locating the source of projectile fluid droplets
The ill-posed projectile problem of finding the source height from spattered
droplets of viscous fluid is a longstanding obstacle to accident reconstruction
and crime scene analysis. It is widely known how to infer the impact angle of
droplets on a surface from the elongation of their impact profiles. However,
the lack of velocity information makes finding the height of the origin from
the impact position and angle of individual drops not possible. From aggregate
statistics of the spatter and basic equations of projectile motion, we
introduce a reciprocal correlation plot that is effective when the polar launch
angle is concentrated in a narrow range. The vertical coordinate depends on the
orientation of the spattered surface, and equals the tangent of the impact
angle for a level surface. When the horizontal plot coordinate is twice the
reciprocal of the impact distance, we can infer the source height as the slope
of the data points in the reciprocal correlation plot. If the distribution of
launch angles is not narrow, failure of the method is evident in the lack of
linear correlation. We perform a number of experimental trials, as well as
numerical calculations and show that the height estimate is insensitive to
aerodynamic drag. Besides its possible relevance for crime investigation,
reciprocal-plot analysis of spatter may find application to volcanism and other
topics and is most immediately applicable for undergraduate science and
engineering students in the context of crime-scene analysis.Comment: To appear in the American Journal of Physics (ms 23338). Improved
readability and organization in this versio
Dynamics of folding in Semiflexible filaments
We investigate the dynamics of a single semiflexible filament, under the
action of a compressing force, using numerical simulations and scaling
arguments. The force is applied along the end to end vector at one extremity of
the filament, while the other end is held fixed. We find that, unlike in
elastic rods the filament folds asymmetrically with a folding length which
depends only on the bending stiffness and the applied force. It is shown that
this behavior can be attributed to the exponentially falling tension profile in
the filament. While the folding time depends on the initial configuration, at
late time, the distance moved by the terminal point of the filament and the
length of the fold shows a power law dependence on time with an exponent 1/2.Comment: 13 pages, Late
A continuous isotropic-nematic liquid crystalline transition of F-actin solutions
The phase transition from the isotropic (I) to nematic (N) liquid crystalline
suspension of F-actin of average length m or above was studied by local
measurements of optical birefringence and protein concentration. Both
parameters were detected to be continuous in the transition region, suggesting
that the I-N transition is higher than 1st order. This finding is consistent
with a recent theory by Lammert, Rokhsar & Toner (PRL, 1993, 70:1650),
predicting that the I-N transition may become continuous due to suppression of
disclinations. Indeed, few line defects occur in the aligned phase of F-actin.
Individual filaments in solutions of a few mg/ml F-actin undergo fast
translational diffusion along the filament axis, whereas both lateral and
rotational diffusions are suppressed.Comment: 4 pages with 4 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letter
Two-point microrheology and the electrostatic analogy
The recent experiments of Crocker et al. suggest that microrheological
measurements obtained from the correlated fluctuations of widely-separatedprobe
particles determine the rheological properties of soft, complex materials more
accurately than do the more traditional particle autocorrelations. This
presents an interesting problem in viscoelastic dynamics. We develop an
important, simplifing analogy between the present viscoelastic problem and
classical electrostatics. Using this analogy and direct calculation we analyze
both the one and two particle correlations in a viscoelastic medium in order to
explain this observation
The role of microtubule movement in bidirectional organelle transport
We study the role of microtubule movement in bidirectional organelle
transport in Drosophila S2 cells and show that EGFP-tagged peroxisomes in cells
serve as sensitive probes of motor induced, noisy cytoskeletal motions.
Multiple peroxisomes move in unison over large time windows and show
correlations with microtubule tip positions, indicating rapid microtubule
fluctuations in the longitudinal direction. We report the first high-resolution
measurement of longitudinal microtubule fluctuations performed by tracing such
pairs of co-moving peroxisomes. The resulting picture shows that
motor-dependent longitudinal microtubule oscillations contribute significantly
to cargo movement along microtubules. Thus, contrary to the conventional view,
organelle transport cannot be described solely in terms of cargo movement along
stationary microtubule tracks, but instead includes a strong contribution from
the movement of the tracks.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figure
Intracellular microrheology of motile Amoeba proteus
The motility of motile Amoeba proteus was examined using the technique of
passive particle tracking microrheology, with the aid of newly-developed
particle tracking software, a fast digital camera and an optical microscope. We
tracked large numbers of endogeneous particles in the amoebae, which displayed
subdiffusive motion at short time scales, corresponding to thermal motion in a
viscoelastic medium, and superdiffusive motion at long time scales due to the
convection of the cytoplasm. Subdiffusive motion was characterised by a
rheological scaling exponent of 3/4 in the cortex, indicative of the
semiflexible dynamics of the actin fibres. We observed shear-thinning in the
flowing endoplasm, where exponents increased with increasing flow rate; i.e.
the endoplasm became more fluid-like. The rheology of the cortex is found to be
isotropic, reflecting an isotropic actin gel. A clear difference was seen
between cortical and endoplasmic layers in terms of both viscoelasticity and
flow velocity, where the profile of the latter is close to a Poiseuille flow
for a Newtonian fluid
Anomalous fluctuations of active polar filaments
Using a simple model, we study the fluctuating dynamics of inextensible,
semiflexible polar filaments interacting with active and directed force
generating centres such as molecular motors. Taking into account the fact that
the activity occurs on time-scales comparable to the filament relaxation time,
we obtain some unexpected differences between both the steady-state and
dynamical behaviour of active as compared to passive filaments. For the
statics, the filaments have a {novel} length-scale dependent rigidity.
Dynamically, we find strongly enhanced anomalous diffusion.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
The response function of a sphere in a viscoelastic two-fluid medium
In order to address basic questions of importance to microrheology, we study
the dynamics of a rigid sphere embedded in a model viscoelastic medium
consisting of an elastic network permeated by a viscous fluid. We calculate the
complete response of a single bead in this medium to an external force and
compare the result to the commonly-accepted, generalized Stokes-Einstein
relation (GSER). We find that our response function is well approximated by the
GSER only within a particular frequency range determined by the material
parameters of both the bead and the network. We then discuss the relevance of
this result to recent experiments. Finally we discuss the approximations made
in our solution of the response function by comparing our results to the exact
solution for the response function of a bead in a viscous (Newtonian) fluid.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure
Short- and intermediate-time behavior of the linear stress relaxation in semiflexible polymers
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