Emergence of order in a collection of filaments

A compression of a collection of filaments can lead to the formation of patterns. This phenomenon can be seen in hairs bundling into curls, and DNA strands layering in cell nuclei and the gills of mushroom buckling as they dry. The details of how order emerge in the ensemble of filaments is not well understood, here we have used theory, experiment and simulation we developed a model that explain how the compression leads to the emergence of ordered patterns. It is anticipated that understanding these collection of filaments could have applications for mate-materials, namely materials designed to have special properties, in particular those whose resistance to compression can be tuned.