CAM Seminar - 03/21/19

Abstract:  Elastic rods are ubiquitous in physical and biological systems across a range of length scales, from microtubules to construction beams. Despite their rich history, elastic rod dynamics continue to present novel practical and conceptual challenges. Here I will describe theoretical and experimental work exploring fragmentation and knots in elastic rods. In the first part of the talk we will revisit a famous observation of Feynman, who discovered that dry spaghetti typically breaks into three or more pieces when exposed to large bending stresses. Combining theory, experiments and analytic scaling arguments, we demonstrate that twist may be used to achieve binary fracture of brittle elastic rods. Additionally we find that quenching allows for robust control of the underlying fragmentation cascade. In the second part, we will investigate the relationship between twist and topology with the aim of understanding the global stability of knots.