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Reversibility, Chaos, and Attractors in Periodically Sheared Elastic Filaments

The dynamics of filaments in flow are central to understanding a wide range of biological and soft-matter systems, yet their behavior under time-dependent forcing remains poorly understood. Here, we investigate the long-time dynamics of Brownian inextensible elastic filaments subjected to strong uniform 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, irreversibility emerges from the interplay of flow-induced deformations and thermal noise. This leads to a departure from reversible, deterministic rigid-body dynamics: in this regime, the filaments cycle between nearly straight, flow-aligned conformations at full periods and buckled shapes at half periods. Owing to the time-glide symmetry of the system, two such attracting states in fact coexist with a phase shift of half a period. The system spontaneously selects one, but occasionally switches between them as a result of noise, producing intermittent transitions between apparent order and disorder. This system constitutes an experimentally accessible realization of stochastic symmetry breaking, attractor hopping, and intermittency in a minimal nonequilibrium soft-matter system, with novel implications for the design and control of soft matter systems under time-dependent flows.