Related papers: Capillary micromechanics: Measuring the elasticity…
Extreme deformation of soft matter is central to our understanding of the effects of shock, fracture, and phase change in a variety of systems. Yet, despite, the increasing interest in this area, far-from-equilibrium behaviours of soft…
There are many fields where it is of interest to measure the elastic moduli of tiny fragile fibers, such as filamentous bacteria, actin filaments, DNA, carbon nanotubes, and functional microfibers. The elastic modulus is typically deduced…
Photoelastic techniques are used to make both qualitative and quantitative measurements of the forces within idealized granular materials. The method is based on placing a birefringent granular material between a pair of polarizing filters,…
In complex crystals close to melting or at finite temperatures, different types of defects are ubiquitous and their role becomes relevant in the mechanical response of these solids. Conventional elasticity theory fails to provide a…
Macroscopic elastic core-shell systems can be generated as toy models to be deformed and haptically studied by hand. On the mesoscale, colloidal core-shell particles and microgels are fabricated and investigated by different types of…
Characterizing the elastic properties of soft materials through bulge testing relies on accurate measurement of deformation, which is experimentally challenging. To avoid measuring deformation, we propose a hydrodynamic bulge test for…
Understanding surface mechanics of soft solids, such as soft polymeric gels, is crucial in many engineering processes, such as dynamic wetting and adhesive failure. In these situations, a combination of capillary and elastic forces drives…
We present an experimental investigation of drying suspensions of both hard and soft nanolatex spheres. The crack formation is examined as a function of the proportion of hard and soft deformable particles, leading to tunable elastic…
We report surface shear rheological measurements on dense insoluble monolayers of micron sized colloidal spheres at the oil/water interface and of the protein $\beta$-lactoglobulin at the air/water surface. As expected, the elastic modulus…
We perform Discrete Element Method simulations of wet granular matter in a split-bottom shear cell. To calculate the capillary forces from the liquid bridges between the grains, we used three different approximations. The simulations of the…
We describe the elasticity of compressed microgel suspensions starting from a core--shell model for the single particle. The mechanical properties of the inner core and of the outer corona are described via the mean field Flory theory, and…
The efficiency of soft particles to stabilize emulsions is examined by measuring their desorption free energy, i.e., the mechanical work required to detach the particle from a fluid interface. Here, we consider rubber-like elastic as well…
Our understanding of the elasticity and rheology of disordered materials, such as granular piles, foams, emulsions or dense suspensions relies on improving experimental tools to characterize their behaviour at the particle scale. While 2D…
The constituents of soft matter systems such as colloidal suspensions, emulsions, polymers, and biological tissues undergo microscopic random motion, due to thermal energy. They may also experience drift motion correlated over mesoscopic or…
We study water adsorption-induced deformation of a monolithic, mesoporous silicon membrane traversed by independent channels of $\sim$8 nm diameter. We focus on the elastic constant associated with the Laplace pressure-induced deformation…
We examine the response of a dense colloidal suspension to a local force applied by a small magnetic bead. For small forces, we find a linear relationship between the force and the displacement, suggesting the medium is elastic, even though…
A microfluidic device is constructed from PDMS with a single channel having a short section that is a thin flexible membrane, in order to investigate the complex fluid-structure interaction that arises between a flowing fluid and a…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
This Letter is motivated by some recent experiments on pan-cake shaped nano-samples of metallic glass that indicate a decline in the measured shear modulus upon decreasing the sample radius. Similar measurements on crystalline samples of…
We discuss a class of models for particulate gels in which the particle contacts are described by an effective interaction combining a two-body attraction and a three-body angular repulsion. Using molecular dynamics, we show how varying the…