Related papers: Scaling laws for the response of nonlinear elastic…
Compressed frictional granular matter cannot flow without dilation. Upon forced shearing to generate flow, the amount of dilation may depend on the initial preparation and a host of material variables. On the basis of both experiments and…
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,…
Unlike most synthetic materials, biological materials often stiffen as they are deformed. This nonlinear elastic response, critical for the physiological function of some tissues, has been documented since at least the 19th century, but the…
Herein, we numerically study the rheology of a two-dimensional frictional granular system confined by constant pressure under oscillatory shear. Several scaling laws for the storage and loss moduli against the scaled strain amplitude have…
Disordered elastic networks provide a framework for describing a wide variety of physical systems, ranging from amorphous solids, through polymeric fibrous materials to confluent cell tissues. In many cases, such networks feature two widely…
Many fibrous materials are modeled as elastic networks featuring a substantial separation between the stiffness scales that characterize different microscopic deformation modes of the network's constituents. This scale separation has been…
Theoretical proposals of scaling laws for the differential elastic scattering cross sections of protons are confronted with experimental data over a wide energy range. Different combinations of the transferred momentum and energy resulting…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…
Discrete materials composed of masses connected by strongly nonlinear links with anomalous behavior (reduction of elastic modulus with strain) have very interesting wave dynamics. Such links may be composed of materials exhibiting…
We have studied the elastic response of actin networks with both compliant and rigid crosslinks by modeling molecular motors as force dipoles. Our finite element simulations show that for compliant crosslinkers such as filamin A, the…
We scrutinize the temporally-resolved speed of active cargo transport in living cells, and show intermittent bursting motions. These nonlinear fluctuations follow a scaling law over several decades of time and space, the statistical…
Motivated by the centering of biological objects in large cells, we study the generic properties of centering forces inside a ball (or a volume of spherical topology) in $n$ dimensions. We consider two scenarios : autonomous centering (in…
Stress vs. strain fluctuations in athermal amorphous solids are an example of `crackling noise' of the type studied extensively in the context of elastic membranes moving through random potentials. Contrary to the latter, we do not have a…
The elastic behavior of materials operating in the linear regime is constrained, by definition, to operations that are linear in the imposed deformation. Though the nonlinear regime holds promise for new functionality, the design in this…
Disordered biopolymer gels have striking mechanical properties including strong nonlinearities. In the case of athermal gels (such as collagen-I) the nonlinearity has long been associated with a crossover from a bending dominated to a…
When a thin elastic sheet crumples, the elastic energy condenses into a network of folding lines and point vertices. These folds and vertices have elastic energy densities much greater than the surrounding areas, and most of the work…
A large variety of materials, widely encountered both in engineering applications and in the biological realm, are characterised by a non-vanishing internal stress distribution, even in the absence of external deformations or applied…
Stressed soft materials commonly present viscoelastic signatures in the form of power-law or exponential decay. Understanding the origins of such rheologic behaviors is crucial to find proper technological applications. Using an elastic…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
The strain-energy formulation of nonlinear elasticity can be extended to the case of significant compression by modulating suitable strain energy terms by a function of relative volume. For isotropic materials this can be accomplished by…