Related papers: Unilateral interactions in granular packings: A mo…
We probe the onset and effect of contact changes in 2D soft harmonic particle packings which are sheared quasistatically under controlled strain. First, we show that in the majority of cases, the first contact changes correspond to the…
Many types of mammalian cells exert active contractile forces and mechanically deform their elastic substrate, to accomplish biological functions such as cell migration. These substrate deformations provide a mechanism by which cells can…
We perform numerical simulations to study self-assembly of nanoparticles mediated by an elastic planar surface. We show how the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of these surfaces leads to anisotropic interactions between the…
We introduce a contact law for the normal force generated between two contacting, elastically anisotropic bodies of arbitrary geometry. The only requirement is that their surfaces be smooth and frictionless. This anisotropic contact law is…
We use numerical simulations to show how noninteracting hard particles binding to a deformable elastic shell may self-assemble into a variety of linear patterns. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of shells.…
The evolution of the internal granular structure in shear-arrested and shear-flowing states of granular materials is characterized using fabric tensors as descriptors of the internal contact and force networks. When a dilute system of…
The mechanical yield of dense granular materials is a fascinating rheological phenomenon, beyond which stress no longer increases with strain at a sufficiently large deformation. Understanding the behavior of mechanical responses associated…
We study interactions between biological cells that apply anisotropic active mechanical forces on an elastic substrate. We model the cells as thin discs that along their perimeters apply radial, but angle-dependent forces on the substrate.…
We investigate mixing effects on the glass state of binary colloidal hard-sphere-like mixtures with large size asymmetry, at a constant volume fraction phi = 0.61. The structure, dynamics and viscoelastic response as a function of mixing…
We show here a general model of phase separation in isotropic condensed matter, namely, a viscoelastic model. We propose that the bulk mechanical relaxation modulus that has so far been ignored in previous theories plays an important role…
The thermally activated magnetic relaxation in two-dimensional ensembles of dipolar interacting nanoparticles with large uniaxial perpendicular anisotropy is studied by a numerical method and within the mean-field approximation. The role…
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…
The paper considers rotations at different scales in granular materials: the rotations of individual particles, the rolling and rigid-rotation of particle pairs, the rotational interactions of a particle within its cluster of neighbors, and…
Elastic interactions arising from a difference of lattice spacing between two coherent phases can have a strong influence on the phase separation (coarsening) of alloys. If the elastic moduli are different in the two phases, the elastic…
There has been increasing experimental evidence of non-affine elastic deformation mechanisms in biological soft tissues. These observations call for novel constitutive models which are able to describe the dominant underlying…
When weakly jammed packings of soft, viscous, non-Brownian spheres are probed mechanically, they respond with a complex admixture of elastic and viscous effects. While many of these effects are understood for specific, approximate models of…
We calculate the elastic field mediated interaction between macroscopic particles in a columnar hexagonal phase. The interaction is found to be long-ranged and non-central, with both attractive and repulsive parts. We show how the…
The shear-banding instability in quasi-statically driven bulk metallic glasses emerges from collective dynamics, mediated by shear transformation zones and associated non-local elastic interactions. It is also phenomenologically known that…
We numerically examine the nonlinear rubber elasticity of topologically constrained polymer networks. We propose a simple and effective model based on Graessley and Pearson's topological model (GP model) for describing the topological…
A material's response to small but finite deformations can reveal the roots of its response to much larger deformations. Here, we identify commonalities in the responses of 2D soft jammed solids with different amounts of disorder. We…