Dresden 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm
Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe
CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik
CPP 20: Complex Fluids and Soft Matter (joint session DY/CPP)
CPP 20.6: Vortrag
Dienstag, 10. März 2026, 10:45–11:00, ZEU/0160
Euler buckling on curved surfaces — •Shiheng Zhao1,2,3 and Pierre A. Haas1,2,3 — 1Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems — 2Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics — 3Center for Systems Biology Dresden
Nearly three hundred years ago, Euler showed that an inextensible straight elastic line in the plane buckles under compression when the compressive force F reaches a critical value F∗>0. But how does such an elastic line buckle within a general curved surface? Here [1], we reveal that the classical instability changes fundamentally: By weakly nonlinear analysis of the buckling of an asymptotically short elastic line, we show that the critical force for the lowest buckling mode is F∗=0 and discover a new bifurcation structure in which the modes of classical Euler buckling split into pairs. For long elastic lines, we numerically find an additional bifurcation by which the second of these new modes becomes the lowest mode and show that, at sufficiently large F, they undergo discontinuous snap-through to higher end-to-end compression. We explain these bifurcations in terms of the general unfolding of a pitchfork. This constitutes the foundations for a class of mechanical instabilities within curved surfaces from which, for example, biological shape emerges in development.
[1] S. Zhao and P. A. Haas, Phys. Rev. Lett. (in press)
Keywords: Mechanical instability; Bifurcations; Euler buckling