Related papers: Mechanical switching of ferro-electric rubber
General microscopic mechanism of ferroelectric ordering in chiral smectic C* liquid crystals is considered. It is shown that if the mesogenic molecules have a sufficiently low symmetry, the spontaneous polarization is proportional to one of…
The recent discovery of ferroelectric nematics-genuine 3D ferroelectric fluids-has underscored the importance of electrostatic interactions in shaping the physical behaviour of soft matter systems. In this paper, we investigate the…
A cylindrical rubber fibre subject to twist will also elongate: a manifestation of Poynting's effect in large strain elasticity. Here, we construct an analogous treatment for an active rubber fibre actuated via an axisymmetric pattern of…
Two-dimensional materials are extraordinarily sensitive to external stimuli, making them ideal for studying fundamental properties and for engineering devices with new functionalities. One such stimulus, strain, affects the magnetic…
In our previous study, we demonstrated the existence of an unidentified ferroelectric smectic phase in the low-temperature region of the ferroelectric smectic A phase, where the layer spacing decreases with decreasing temperature. In the…
Shearing stresses can change the volume of a material via a nonlinear effect known as shear dilatancy. We calculate the elastic dilatancy coefficient of soft sphere packings and random spring networks, two canonical models of marginal…
The mechanical behavior of two-dimensional (2D) materials across 2D phase changes is unknown, and the finite temperature ($T$) elasticity of paradigmatic SnSe monolayers -- ferroelectric 2D materials turning paraelectric as their unit cell…
Controlled variation of the electronic properties of 2D materials by applying strain has emerged as a promising way to design materials for customized applications. Using first principles density functional theory calculations, we show that…
Biological soft tissues exhibit elastic properties which can be dramatically different from rubber-type materials (elastomers). To gain a better understanding of the role of constitutive relationships in determining material responses under…
The shape of liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) with spatial variation in the director orientation can be transformed by exposure to a stimulus. Here, informed by previously reported analytical treatments, we prepare complex spiral…
For monodomain nematic elastomers, we construct generalised elastic-nematic constitutive models combining purely elastic and neoclassical-type strain-energy densities. Inspired by recent developments in stochastic elasticity, we extend…
The mechanical response of rubbers has been ubiquitously assumed to be only a function of the imposed strain. Using innovative X-ray measurements capturing the three-dimensional spatial volumetric strain fields, we demonstrate that rubbers…
Helical ribbons arise in many biological and engineered systems, often driven by anisotropic surface stress, residual strain, and geometric or elastic mismatch between layers of a laminated composite. A full mathematical analysis is…
Strain plays a critical role in the properties of materials. In silicon and silicon-germanium, strain provides a mechanism for control of both carrier mobility and band offsets. In materials integra-tion, strain is typically tuned through…
Nematic elastomers with a locked-in anisotropy direction exhibit semi-soft elastic response characterized by a plateau in the stress-strain curve in which stress does not change with strain. We calculate the global phase diagram for a…
We investigate experimentally the mechanical response to shear of a 2D packing of grains across the jamming transition. First, we develop a dedicated experimental setup, together with tracking and photoelastic techniques in order to prepare…
The onset of nonlinear effects in metals, such as plasticity and damage, is strongly influenced by the heterogeneous stress distribution at the grain level. This work is devoted to studying the local stress distribution of shear stresses…
A mechanical strain field applied to a monodomain cholesteric elastomer will unwind the helical director distribution. There is an analogy with the classical problem of an electric field applied to a cholesteric liquid crystal, but with…
Randomly crosslinked macromolecules undergo a liquid-to-amorphous solid phase transition at a critical crosslink concentration. This transition has two main signatures: the random localization of a fraction of the monomers and the emergence…
We show that a spontaneous strain and spontaneous magnetization can arise in the doped topological insulators with a two-component superconducting vector order parameter. The details of the effects crucially depend on the symmetry of the…