Related papers: Softly Constrained Films
Deployable structures, essential across various engineering applications ranging from umbrellas to satellites, are evolving to include soft, morphable designs where geometry drives transformation. However, a major challenge for soft…
Wrinkling, creasing and folding are frequent phenomena encountered in biological and man-made bilayers made by thin films bonded to thicker and softer substrates often containing fibers. Paradigmatic examples of the latter are the skin, the…
Investigations of free-standing liquid films enjoy an increasing popularity due to their relevance for many fundamental and applied scientific problems. They constitute soap bubbles and foams, serve as membranes for gas transport or as…
Wrinkling patterns at the metallized surface of thin polymer films are shown to be sensitive to the sticky or slippery character of the polymer/substrate interface (titanium coating, polystyrene film and coated silicon substrate). Selective…
The remarkable range of biological forms in and around us, such as the undulating shape of a leaf or flower in the garden, the coils in our gut, or the folds in our brain, raise a number of questions at the interface of biology, physics and…
Hyperuniform materials, characterized by their suppressed density fluctuations and vanishing structure factors as the wave number approaches zero, represent a unique state of matter that straddles the boundary between order and randomness.…
Micropillar compression experiments probing size effects in confined plasticity of metal thin films, including the indirect imposition of 'canonical' simple shearing boundary conditions, show dramatically different responses in compression…
From multicellular tissues to bacterial colonies, three dimensional cellular structures arise through the interaction of cellular activities and mechanical forces. Simple bacterial communities provide model systems for analyzing such…
How can dense biological tissue maintain sharp boundaries between coexisting cell populations? We explore this question within a simple vertex model for cells, focusing on the role of topology and tissue surface tension. We show that the…
We study the fluid-mediated approach of a deformable axisymmetric object towards a rigid substrate, focusing on how its shape influences contact formation. For low approach velocities and large Stokes numbers, we show that sharper profiles…
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,…
Morphology and performance are conjointed attributes of metamaterials, of which sculptured thin films (STFs) are examples. STFs are assemblies of nanowires that can be fabricated from many different materials, typically via physical vapor…
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…
In recent years, there has been a considerable interest in the mechanics of soft objects meeting fluid interfaces (elasto-capillary interactions). In this work we experimentally examine the case of a fluid resting on a thin film of rigid…
Fiber-reinforcement is a universal feature of many biological tissues. It involves the interplay between fiber stiffness, fiber orientation, and the elastic properties of the matrix, influencing pattern formation and evolution in layered…
The linear dispersion relation for longwave surface perturbations, as derived by Levine et al. Phys. Rev. B 75, 205312 (2007) is extended to include a smooth surface energy anisotropy function with a variable anisotropy strength (from weak…
Biological tissues exhibit complex behaviors with their dynamics often resembling inert soft matter such as liquids, polymers, colloids, and liquid crystals. These analogies enable physics-based approaches for investigations of emergent…
We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
Periodic wrinkling of a rigid capping layer on a deformable substrate provides a useful method for templating surface topography for a variety of novel applications. Many experiments have studied wrinkle formation during the compression of…