Related papers: Softly Constrained Films
A particle placed in soft matter distorts its host and creates an energy landscape. This can occur, for example, for particles in liquid crystals, for particles on lipid bilayers or for particles trapped at fluid interfaces. Such energies…
A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…
Sculptured thin films (STFs) are nano-engineered materials whose columnar morphology is tailored to elicit desired optical responses upon excitation. Two canonical forms of STFs have been identified. Linear constitutive relations for…
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,…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
Surface stresses have recently emerged as a key player in the mechanics of highly compliant solids. The classic theories of contact mechanics describe adhesion with a compliant substrate as a competition between surface energies driving…
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for physicists, since they…
The structure and degree of order in soft matter and other materials is intimately connected to the nature of the interactions between the particles. One important research goal is to find suitable control mechanisms, to enhance or suppress…
This review provides an introduction to the essential physics of soft adhesion, including the thermodynamics of adhesion and wetting, the mechanics of contact with deformable materials, and the material properties that most affect…
Collective cell motions underlie structure formation during embryonic development. Tissues exhibit emergent multicellular characteristics such as jamming, rigidity transitions, and glassy dynamics, but there remain questions about how those…
Recent years have seen a large increase in the number of reported framework materials, including the nowadays-ubiquitous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Many of these materials show flexibility and stimuli-responsiveness, i.e. their…
Rigidity transitions in simple models of confluent cells have been a powerful organizing principle in understanding the dynamics and mechanics of dense biological tissue. In this work we explore the interplay between geometry and rigidity…
The curvature potential arising from confining a particle initially in three-dimensional space onto a curved surface is normally derived in the hard constraint $q \to 0$ limit, with $q$ the degree of freedom normal to the surface. In this…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the occurrence of inhomogeneous shear flows in soft jammed materials. We use rough walls to impose a simple shear flow and study the athermal motion of jammed assemblies of soft…
In this study, we investigate the dynamics of particles overcoming the hydrodynamic barrier posed by a thin fluid film to achieve contact in finite time, a phenomenon critical in various natural and engineered processes such as enzyme…
The equilibrium properties of block copolymer micelles confined in polymer thin films are investigated using self-consistent field theory. The theory is based on a model system consisting of AB diblock copolymers and A homopolymers. Two…
Thin films buckle easily and form wrinkled states in regions of well defined size. The extent of a wrinkled region is typically assumed to reflect the zone of in-plane compressive stresses prior to buckling, but recent experiments on…
Simulations of the structure and dynamics of fluid films confined to a thickness of a few molecular diameters are described. Confining walls introduce layering and in-plane order in the adjacent fluid. The latter is essential to transfer of…
In Nature, liquids often circulate in channels textured with leaflets, cilia or porous walls that deform with the flow. These soft structures are optimized to passively control flows and inspire the design of novel microfluidic and soft…
Recent experiments have imposed controlled swelling patterns on thin polymer films, which subsequently buckle into three-dimensional shapes. We develop a solution to the design problem suggested by such systems, namely, if and how one can…