Related papers: Soft Elasticity in Nematic Liquid-Crystal Networks
By Monte Carlo simulations of a soft ellipsoid model for liquid crystals, we study whether a layer of grafted liquid-crystalline chain molecules can induce tilt in a nematic fluid. The chains are fairly short (four monomers) and made of the…
The nonequilibrium dynamical behavior and structure formation of end-functionalized semiflexible polymer suspensions under flow are investigated by mesoscale hydrodynamic simulations. The hybrid simulation approach combines the…
Phase separation has recently emerged as an important organizational principle in the dense and heterogeneous environment within living cells. Here, we use a synthetic system to show that compressive stresses in a polymer network suppress…
The phase-field-crystal model for liquid crystals is solved numerically in two spatial dimensions. This model is formulated with three position-dependent order parameters, namely the reduced translational density, the local nematic order…
Phase separation of a liquid mixture embedded within an elastic network is relevant to a wide range of natural and industrial systems, including biomolecular condensates interacting with the cytoskeleton, structural colouring in bird…
Machine learning algorithms have been available since the 1990s, but it is much more recently that they have come into use also in the physical sciences. While these algorithms have already proven to be useful in uncovering new properties…
We use computer simulations to study the morphology and rheological properties of a bidimensional emulsion resulting from a mixture of a passive isotropic fluid and an active contractile polar gel, in the presence of a surfactant that…
We develop a model for gels and entangled solutions of semiflexible biopolymers such as F-actin. Such networks play a crucial structural role in the cytoskeleton of cells. We show that the rheologic properties of these networks can result…
Disordered spring networks are a useful paradigm to examine macroscopic mechanical properties of amorphous materials. Here, we study the elastic behavior of under-constrained spring networks, i.e.\ networks with more degrees of freedom than…
We model within the framework of finite elasticity two inherent instabilities observed in liquid crystal elastomers under uniaxial tension. First is necking which occurs when a material sample suddenly elongates more in a small region where…
We study experimentally the motion of non-deformable microbeads in a linear shear flow close to a wall bearing a thin and soft polymer layer. Combining microfluidics and 3D optical tracking, we demonstrate that the steady-state bead/surface…
Dislocations in soft condensed matter systems such as lamellar systems of polymers, liquid crystals and ternary mixtures of oil, water and surfactant (amphiphilic systems) are described in the framework of continuum elastic theory. These…
The shear strength and stick-slip behavior of a rough rock joint are analyzed using the complex network approach. We develop a network approach on correlation patterns of void spaces of an evolvable rough fracture (crack type II).…
We study quasi-static deformation of dense granular packings. The packing is deformed by imposing external boundary conditions, which model engineering experiments such as shear and compression. We propose a two-dimensional network model of…
A micrometer-scale elastic shell immersed in a nematic liquid crystal may be deformed by the host if the cost of deformation is comparable to the cost of elastic deformation of the nematic. Moreover, such inclusions interact and form chains…
A nematic liquid-crystal gel is a macroscopically homogeneous elastic medium with the rotational symmetry of a nematic liquid crystal. In this paper, we develop a general approach to the study of these gels that incorporates all underlying…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
The observation recently of 12-fold quasicrystals in polymers, nanoparticle mixture and 12-fold and 18-fold quasicrystals in colloidal solutions are important events for the study of quasicrystals. To describe the mechanical behaviour we…
We present a theoretical framework for the linear and nonlinear visco-elastic properties of reversibly crosslinked networks of semiflexible polymers. In contrast to affine models where network strain couples to the polymer end-to-end…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…