Related papers: Anomalous elasticity in nematic and smectic elasto…
We present a theory of the elasticity and fluctuations of the Smectic A and C phases in uniaxial, anisotropic disordered environments, e.g., stretched aerogel. We find that, bizarrely, the low-temperature, lower-symmetry Smectic $C$ phase…
The fluctuations of two-dimensional extended objects membranes is a rich and exciting field with many solid results and a wide range of open issues. We review the distinct universality classes of membranes, determined by the local order,…
The mechanical response of naturally abundant amorphous solids such as gels, jammed grains, and biological tissues are not described by the conventional paradigm of broken symmetry that defines crystalline elasticity. In contrast, the…
The initiation of directional cell motion requires symmetry breaking that can happen both with or without external stimuli. During cell crawling, forces generated by the cytoskeleton and their transmission through mechanosensitive adhesions…
We study the shapes of elastic membranes under the simultaneous exertion of tensile and compressive forces when the translational symmetry along the tension direction is broken. We predict a multitude of novel morphological phases in…
Electronic nematicity is widely observed in quantum materials with varying degrees of electronic correlation, manifesting through charge, spin, orbital, or superconducting degrees of freedom. A phenomenological model capable of describing…
We derive the effective energy density of thin membranes of liquid crystal elastomers as the Gamma-limit of a widely used bulk model. These membranes can display fine-scale features both due to wrinkling that one expects in thin elastic…
We investigate thermal fluctuations in a smectic A phase of an amphiphile-solvent mixture with molecular dynamics simulations. We use an idealized model system, where solvent particles are represented by simple beads, and amphiphiles by…
Ideal (monodomain) smectic-$A$ elastomers crosslinked in the smectic-$A$ phase are simply uniaxial rubbers, provided deformations are small. From these materials smectic-$C$ elastomers are produced by a cooling through the smectic-$A$ to…
In two dimensional nematics, topological defects are point like singularities with both a charge and a phase. We study topological defects within curved nematic textures on the surface of a cylinder. This allows us to isolate the effect of…
Using a continuum bead-spring Monte Carlo model, we study the anomalous diffusion dynamics of a self-avoiding tethered membrane by means of extensive computer simulations. We focus on the subdiffusive stochastic motion of the membrane's…
In this paper we consider a family of three-dimensional problems in thermoelasticity for linear elliptic membrane shells and study the asymptotic behaviour of the solution when the thickness tends to zero.We fully characterize with strong…
In twist-bend nematic (N\textsubscript{TB}) liquid crystals (LCs), the mean molecular orientation exhibits heliconical structure with nanoscale periodicity. On the mesoscopic scale, N\textsubscript{TB} resembles layered systems (like…
Nematic elastomers are programmable soft materials that display large, reversible and predictable deformation under an external stimulus such as a change in temperature or light. While much of the work in the field has focused on actuation…
We study two aspects of the elasticity of smectic-$A$ elastomers that make these materials genuinely and qualitatively different from conventional uniaxial rubbers. Under strain applied parallel to the layer normal, monodomain smectic-$A$…
We report on a simulational study of the compression and buckling of elastic ridges formed by joining the boundary of a flat sheet to itself. Such ridges store energy anomalously: their resting energy scales as the linear size of the sheet…
The dynamical scaling properties of selfavoiding polymerized membranes with internal dimension D are studied using model A dynamics. It is shown that the theory is renormalizable to all orders in perturbation theory and that the dynamical…
Using numerical simulations, we characterized the behavior of an elastic membrane immersed in an active fluid. Our findings reveal a nontrivial folding and re-expansion of the membrane that is controlled by the interplay of its resistance…
To facilitate the understanding of the mechanisms underlying the electric breakdown of dielectric elastomers, we derive a one-dimensional (1d) model for axisymmetric necking in a dielectric membrane subjected to equibiaxial stretching and…
Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…