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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 33: Poster: Nonlinear Dynamics, Pattern Formation and Networks

DY 33.16: Poster

Mittwoch, 20. März 2024, 15:00–18:00, Poster C

Towards bacterial growth laws for shape-conserving cell wall growth: a linear stability analysis — •Paul Nemec and Ulrich Gerland — Physics Department, Technical University of Munich

Inspired by the question of how bacteria maintain their shapes during growth, we study how pressurised elastic shells may grow robustly. Specifically, we ask how cell envelope growth could depend on local observables like curvature or stress, such that perturbed spherical or spherocylindrical cells recover their shape. Within a simplistic continuum model of a growing elastic shell, general requirements like locality, isotropy and material-frame indifference provide strong constraints on local growth laws. By linearising around a growing and pressurised reference trajectory, we obtain linear stability results for different ways that growth may couple to local observables. By requiring that growth depends on local observables isotropically, the space of possible linear couplings dramatically reduces. For a sphere, we are left with a six-dimensional space of couplings, which we investigate to find that naive isotropic growth is generally unstable, but can be stabilised by additional coupling.