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Reconstitution of Basic Mitotic Spindles in Spherical Emulsion Droplets
Published on: August 13, 2016
Forceless Sadowsky strips are spherical
E L Starostin1, G H M van der Heijden1
1Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
We show that thin rectangular ribbons, defined as energy-minimizing configurations of the Sadowsky functional for narrow developable elastic strips, have a propensity to form spherical shapes in the sense that forceless solutions lie on a sphere. This has implications for ribbonlike objects in (bio)polymer physics and nanoscience that cannot be described by the classical wormlike chain model. A wider class of functionals with this property is identified.
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