Abstract:The buckling and twisting of slender, elastic fibers is a deep and well-studied field. A slender elastic rod that is twisted with respect to a fixed end will spontaneously form a loop, or hockle, to relieve the torsional stress that builds. Further twisting results in the formation of plectonemes -a helical excursion in the fiber that extends with additional twisting. Here we use an idealized, micron-scale experiment to investigate the energy stored, and subsequently released, by hockles and plectonemes as the… Show more
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