Related papers: Stability and anomalous entropic elasticity of sub…
We study the elastic properties of thermal networks of Hookean springs. In the purely mechanical limit, such systems are known to have vanishing rigidity when their connectivity falls below a critical, isostatic value. In this work we show…
Disordered spring networks are a useful paradigm to examine macroscopic mechanical properties of amorphous materials. Here, we study the elastic behavior of under-constrained spring networks, i.e.\ networks with more degrees of freedom than…
Jammed packings of repulsive elastic spheres have emerged as a rich model system within which elastic properties of disordered glassy materials may be elucidated. Most of the work on these packings have focused on the case of vanishing…
Athermal (i.e. zero-temperature) under-constrained systems are typically floppy, but they can be rigidified by the application of external strain, which is theoretically well understood. Here and in the companion paper, we extend this…
At zero temperature, spring networks with connectivity below Maxwell's isostatic threshold undergo a mechanical phase transition from a floppy state at small strains to a rigid state for applied shear strain above a critical strain…
Isostatic networks are minimally rigid and therefore have, generically, nonzero elastic moduli. Regular isostatic networks have finite moduli in the limit of large sizes. However, numerical simulations show that all elastic moduli of…
In recent work it was clarified that amorphous solids under strain control do not possess nonlinear elastic theory in the sense that the shear modulus exists but nonlinear moduli exhibit sample to sample fluctuations that grow without bound…
Disordered soft materials, such as fibrous networks in biological contexts exhibit a nonlinear elastic response. We study such nonlinear behavior with a minimal model for networks on lattice geometries with simple Hookian elements with…
Biopolymer networks are common in biological systems from the cytoskeleton of individual cells to collagen in the extracellular matrix. The mechanics of these systems under applied strain can be explained in some cases by a phase transition…
The scaling of the shear modulus near the gelation/vulcanization transition is explored heuristically and analytically. It is found that in a dense melt the effective chains of the infinite cluster have sizes that scale sub-linearly with…
Recent progress on studies of the nanoscale mechanical responses in disordered systems has highlighted a strong degree of heterogeneity in the elastic moduli. In this contribution, using computer simulations, we study the elastic…
The rigidity of elastic networks depends sensitively on their internal connectivity and the nature of the interactions between constituents. Particles interacting via central forces undergo a zero-temperature rigidity-percolation transition…
We study the shear jamming of athermal frictionless soft spheres, and find that in the thermodynamic limit, a shear-jammed state exists with different elastic properties from the isotropically-jammed state. For example, shear-jammed states…
Disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks exhibit a low linear elastic shear modulus at small strains, but stiffen dramatically at high strains. Experiments have shown that the elastic modulus can increase by up to three…
We present a unified formulation of a rotationally invariant nonlinear elasticity for a variety of spontaneously anisotropic phases, and use it to study thermal fluctuations in nematic elastomers and spontaneously anisotropic gels. We find…
Athermal (i.e. zero-temperature) under-constrained systems are typically floppy, but they can be rigidified by the application of external strain. Following our recently developed analytical theory for the athermal limit, here and in the…
The thermodynamics and dynamics of supercooled liquids correlate with their elasticity. In particular for covalent networks, the jump of specific heat is small and the liquid is {\it strong} near the threshold valence where the network…
We study the influence of thermal fluctuations on the fracture of elastic networks, via simulations of the uniaxial extension of central-force spring networks with varying rigidity, i.e. connectivity. Studying their failure response, both…
Randomly crosslinked macromolecules undergo a liquid-to-amorphous solid phase transition at a critical crosslink concentration. This transition has two main signatures: the random localization of a fraction of the monomers and the emergence…
We study the elastic theory of amorphous solids made of particles with finite range interactions in the thermodynamic limit. For the elastic theory to exist one requires all the elastic coefficients, linear and nonlinear, to attain a finite…