Dynamics of undulatory fluctuations of semiflexible filaments in a network

Abstract

We study the dynamics of a single semiflexible filament coupled to a Hookean spring at its boundary. The spring produces a fluctuating tensile force on the filament, whose value depends on the filament's instantaneous end-to-end length. The spring thereby introduces a nonlinearity, which mixes the undulatory normal modes of the filament and changes their dynamics. We study these dynamics using the Martin-Siggia-Rose-Janssen-de-Domincis formalism, and compute the time-dependent correlation functions of transverse undulations and of the filament's end-to-end distance. The relaxational dynamics of the modes below a characteristic wavelength $\sqrt{\kappa/\tau_R}$, set by the filament's bending modulus $\kappa$ and spring-renormalized tension $\tau_{R}$, are changed by the boundary spring. This occurs near the cross-over frequency between tension- and bending-dominated modes of the system. The boundary spring can be used to represent the linear elastic compliance of the rest of the filament network to which the filament is cross-linked. As a result, we predict that this nonlinear effect will be observable in the dynamical correlations of constituent filaments of networks and in the networks' collective shear response. The system's dynamic shear modulus is predicted to exhibit the well-known crossover with increasing frequency from $\omega^{1/2}$ to $\omega^{3/4}$, but the inclusion of the the network's compliance in the analysis of the individual filament dynamics shifts this transition to a higher frequency.