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Confinement can significantly alter fluid properties, offering potential for specific technological applications. However, achieving precise control over the structural complexity of confined fluids and soft matter remains challenging, as…
A thin circular elastic sheet floating on a drop-like liquid substrate is deformed due to incompatibility between the curved substrate and the planar sheet. We adopt a variational viewpoint by minimizing the non-convex membrane energy…
Living cells respond to mechanical changes in the matrix surrounding them by applying contractile forces that are in turn transmitted to distant cells. We calculate the mechanical work that each cell performs in order to deform the matrix,…
We examine the equilibrium and stability of an elastocapillary system to model drying-induced structural failures. The model comprises a circular elastic membrane with a hole at the center that is deformed by the capillary pressure of…
Experiments reveal that structural transitions in thin sheets are mediated by the passage of transient and stable mobile localized elastic excitations. These ``crumples'' or ``d-cones'' nucleate, propagate, interact, annihilate, and escape.…
Living materials such as membranes, cytoskeletal assemblies, cell collectives and tissues can often be described as active solids -- materials that are energized from within, with elastic response about a well defined reference…
A randomly pinned elastic medium in two dimensions is modeled by a disordered fully-packed loop model. The energetics of disorder-induced dislocations is studied using exact and polynomial algorithms from combinatorial optimization.…
Thin elastic sheets appear in systems ranging from graphene to biological membranes, where phenomena such as wrinkling, folding, and thermal fluctuations originate from geometric nonlinearities. These effects are treated within weakly…
In active matter systems, deformable boundaries provide a mechanism to organize internal active stresses and perform work on the external environment. To study a minimal model of such a system, we perform particle-based simulations of an…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
Many engineering structures are composed of weakly coupled sectors assembled in a cyclic and ideally symmetric configuration, which can be simplified as forced Duffing oscillators. In this paper, we study the emergence of localized states…
We study the formation and evolution of localized geometrical defects in an indented cylindrical elastic shell using a combination of experiment and numerical simulation. We find that as a symmetric localized indentation on a…
The recent discovery of electro-active polymers has shown great promises in the field of soft robotics, and was logically followed by experimental, numerical and theoretical developments. Most of these studies were concerned with systems…
In vivo and in vitro systems of cells and extra-cellular matrix (ECM) systems are well known to form ordered patterns of orientationally aligned fibers. Here, we interpret them as active analogs of the (disordered) isotropic to the…
We study the behavior of thin elastic sheets that are bent and strained under the influence of weak, smooth confinement. We show that the emerging shapes exhibit the coexistence of two types of domains that differ in their characteristic…
Hollow microgels are elastic polymer shells easily realizable in experiments. Recent works have shown the emergence of buckling events in dilute hollow microgels under the effect of an added osmotic pressure. Here, we perform large-scale…
The long-ranged elastic model, which is believed to describe the evolution of a self-affine rough crack-front, is analyzed to linear and non-linear orders. It is shown that the nonlinear terms, while important in changing the front…
Crumpling an ordinary thin sheet transforms it into a structure with unusual mechanical behaviors, such as enhanced rigidity, emission of crackling noise, slow relaxations, and memory retention. A central challenge in explaining these…
In this article, we investigate the effects of the interplay between quadratic and cubic nonlinearities on the propagation of elastic waves in periodic waveguides. Through this framework, we unveil an array of wave control strategies that…
Growing experimental evidence indicates that topological defects could serve as organizing centers in the morphogenesis of tissues. Here, we provide a quantitative explanation for this phenomenon, rooted in the buckling theory of deformable…