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Reversibility, Chaos, and Attractors in Periodically Sheared Elastic Filaments

Francesco Bonacci1,*, Brato Chakrabarti2,*, Olivia du Roure3, Anke Lindner3,4, and David Saintillan5

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Phys. Rev. X 16, 031067 – Published 14 September, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/84g7-fmcv

Abstract

The dynamics of flexible filaments in flow underpin a broad range of biological and soft-matter phenomena, yet their response to time-dependent forcing remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate the long-time dynamics of Brownian inextensible elastic filaments subjected to strong oscillatory shear by combining microfluidic experiments on actin filaments with numerical simulations based on a fluctuating Euler-Bernoulli elastica model in a viscous fluid. As the oscillation period increases, the interplay of flow-induced buckling and thermal fluctuations drives a transition away from reversible rigid-body dynamics. Remarkably, the time-glide symmetry of oscillatory shear gives rise to two coexisting symmetry-related dynamical attractors, between which stochastic fluctuations induce intermittent switching events. These attractors correspond to cyclic states in which filaments become nearly straight and flow aligned at full periods while adopting buckled conformations at half periods. Individual filaments spontaneously select one attractor but intermittently hop to the other, producing alternating episodes of ordered and chaotic dynamics. Our results establish periodically driven Brownian flexible filaments as an experimentally accessible realization of stochastic symmetry breaking, attractor hopping, and intermittency in a minimal nonequilibrium system, and present novel opportunities for the design and control of soft materials under time-dependent flows.

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Periodic driving can produce surprisingly complex behavior, from Faraday waves and Kapitza pendulum to Floquet topological insulators and time crystals. Here, we studied what happens when a single microscopic elastic filament is periodically sheared back and forth in a fluid by combining microfluidic experiments on single actin filaments, numerical simulations, and dynamical-systems analysis of the underlying deterministic dynamics. Rather than simply becoming irreversible, the filament enters an unexpected regime in which it alternates between long periods of nearly reversible motion and sudden bursts of chaotic behavior. This intermittency emerges from the interplay between elasticity, thermal fluctuations, and periodic forcing, which drives stochastic transitions between two coexisting dynamical states. Our findings uncover a previously unknown form of nonequilibrium dynamics and establish a simple experimental platform for studying how noise and periodic driving together give rise to complex behavior in physical systems.

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Phys. Rev. X 16, 031067– Published 14 September, 2026
  • Received 1 December 2025
  • Accepted 31 July 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

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