Related papers: Simulating defect textures on coalescing nematic s…
Experiments reveal that structural transitions in thin sheets are mediated by the passage of transient and stable mobile localized elastic excitations. These ``crumples'' or ``d-cones'' nucleate, propagate, interact, annihilate, and escape.…
Soft materials with layered structure such as membranes, block copolymers, and smectics exhibit intriguing morphologies with nontrivial curvatures. We report on restructuring the Gaussian and mean curvatures of smectic A films with free…
We present numerical simulations of the adiabatic interaction of a shock with a clumpy region containing many individual clouds. Our work incorporates a sub-grid turbulence model which for the first time makes this investigation feasible.…
The impact of a collapsing gas bubble above rigid, notched walls is considered. Such surface crevices and imperfections often function as bubble nucleation sites, and thus have a direct relation to cavitation-induced erosion and damage…
Soft modulated phases have been shown to undergo complex morphological transitions, in which layer remodeling induced by mean and Gaussian curvatures plays a major role. This is the case in smectic films under thermal treatment, where focal…
Wetting is fundamental to many technological applications that involve the motion of the fluid-fluid interface on a solid. While static wetting is well understood in the context of thermodynamic equilibrium, dynamic wetting is more…
Many physical systems involve two types of orientational order, which are coupled together. For example, ferroelectric nematic liquid crystals have coupled polar and nematic order, and tilted hexatic phases have coupled polar and hexatic…
A nematic membrane is a sheet with embedded orientational order, which can occur in biological cells, liquid crystal films, manufactured materials, and other soft matter systems. By formulating the free energy of nematic films using tensor…
Dynamics of the pendant drop coalescing with a sessile drop to form a single daughter droplet is known to form a bridge. The bridge evolution begins with a point contact between the two drops leading to a liquid neck of size comparable to…
A three-dimensional round liquid jet within a low-speed coaxial gas flow is numerically simulated and explained via vortex dynamics ($\lambda_2$ method). The instabilities on the liquid-gas interface reflect well the vortex interactions…
"Necks" are features of lipid membranes characterized by an uniquley large curvature, functioning as bridges between different compartments. These features are ubiquitous in the life-cycle of the cell and instrumental in processes such as…
We use density--functional theory to study the structure of two-dimensional defects inside a circular nematic nanocavity. The density, nematic order parameter, and director fields, as well as the defect core energy and core radius, are…
The disk-to-vesicle transition of a fluid membrane with no spontaneous curvature is well described by the competition between edge line and curvature energies. However, the transition of asymmetric membranes with spontaneous curvatures is…
From the theory of topological defect formation proposed for the early universe, the so called Kibble mechanism, it follows that the density correlation functions of defects and anti-defects in a given system should be completely determined…
Cells are fundamental building blocks of living organisms displaying an array of shapes, morphologies, and textures that encode specific functions and physical behaviors. Elucidating the rules of this code remains a challenge. In this work,…
We establish how active stress globally affects the morphology of disclination lines of a three dimensional active nematic liquid crystal under chaotic flow. Thanks to a defect detection algorithm based on the local nematic orientation, we…
Droplet coalescence is ubiquitous in nature and the same time key to various technologies, such as inkjet printing. Here, we report on the coalescence of polymer droplets with different chain lengths coalescing on substrates of different…
Forming an interface between immiscible fluids incurs a free-energy cost that usually favors minimizing the interfacial area. An emulsion droplet of fixed volume therefore tends to form a sphere, and pairs of droplets tend to coalesce.…
One of the most ubiquitous and technologically important phenomena in nature is the nucleation of homogeneous flowing systems. The microscopic effects of shear on a nucleating system are still imperfectly understood, although in recent…
Cell monolayers are a central model system to tissue biophysics. In vivo, epithelial tissues are curved on the scale of microns, and curvature's role in the onset of spontaneous tissue flows is still not well-understood. Here, we present a…