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Geometrically frustrated elastic ribbons exhibit, in many cases, significant changes in configuration depending on the relation between their width and thickness. We show that the existence of such a transition, and the scaling at which it…
Geometric frustration is recognized to generate complex morphologies in self-assembling particulate and molecular systems. In bulk states, frustrated drives structured arrays of topological defects. In the dilute limit, these systems have…
Based on the Kosterlitz-Thouless-Halperin-Nelson-Young (KTHNY) theory of two-dimensional melting and the analogy between Laughlin states and the two-dimensional one-component plasma (2DOCP), we investigate the possibility of liquid…
In two-dimensional (2D) ferromagnets, anisotropy is essential for the magnetic ordering as dictated by the Mermin-Wagner theorem. But when competing anisotropies are present, the phase transition becomes nontrivial. Here, utilizing highly…
The phase behavior of helical packings of thermoresponsive microspheres inside glass capillaries is studied as a function of volume fraction. Stable packings with long-range orientational order appear to evolve abruptly to disordered states…
When the DNA double helix is subjected to external forces it can stretch elastically to elongations reaching 100% of its natural length. These distortions, imposed at the mesoscopic or macroscopic scales, have a dramatic effect on…
The elastic response of the crystalline sheet to the stretching deformation in the form of wrinkles has been extensively investigated. In this work, we extend this fundamental scientific question to the plastic regime by exploring the…
Motivated by recent experiments on the itinerant helimagnet MnSi, we study general properties of helical spin crystals - magnetic structures obtained by superposing distinct spin spirals. An effective Landau description of helical spin…
By using modular functions on the upper complex half-plane, we study a class of strain energies for crystalline materials whose global invariance originates from the full symmetry group of the underlying lattice. This follows Ericksen's…
Deformations that conserve the parallelism and the distances --between layers, in smectic phases; between columns, in columnar phases-- are commonplace in liquid crystals. The resulting deformed textures have the same mass density as in the…
We study numerically the mechanical stability and elasticity properties of duplex DNA molecules within the frame of a network model incorporating microscopic degrees of freedom related with the arrangement of the base pairs. We pay special…
Methane is the simplest hydrocarbon, yet it exhibits an extraordinarily complicated series of crystal phases. Notably, the non-plastic phases have large unit cells with nearly, but not quite cubic symmetry. Furthermore, although non-polar…
Atomically thin 2-dimensional heterostructures are a promising, novel class of materials with groundbreaking properties. The possiblity of choosing the many constituent components and their proportions allows optimizing these materials to…
Nuclear matter at large number of colors is necessarily in a solid phase. In particular holographic nuclear matter takes the form of a crystal of instantons of the flavor group. In this article we initiate the analysis of the…
Octahedral antiferromagnets are distinguished by crystal lattices composed of octahedra of magnetic ions. In the fully frustrated case, the Heisenberg Hamiltonian can be represented as a sum of squares of total spins for each octahedral…
The double-helical structure of DNA results from canonical base pairing and stacking interactions. However, variations from steady-state conformations result from mechanical perturbations in cells. These different topologies have…
By equilibrating condensed DNA arrays against reservoirs of known osmotic stress and examining them with several structural probes, it has been possible to achieve a detailed thermodynamic and structural characterization of the change…
The aim of the present paper is the study of the entropic elasticity of the dsDNA molecule, having a cristallographic length L of the order of 10 to 30 persistence lengths A, when it is subject to spatial obstructions. We have not tried to…
We use numerical simulations to study the phase behavior of a system of purely repulsive soft dumbbells as a function of size ratio of the two components and their relative degree of deformability. We find a plethora of different phases…
Although mechanical properties of DNA are well characterized at the kilo base-pair range, a number of recent experiments have suggested that DNA is more flexible at shorter length scales, which correspond to the regime that is crucial for…