Related papers: Syneresis and delayed detachment in agar plates
We show that there are several striking parallels between the dynamics of gelatin gels and spin glasses. In general, glassy systems retain a memory of their past history. A key characteristic differentiating spin glasses from most other…
Like emulsions, pastes and many other forms of soft condensed matter, aqueous foams present slow mechanical relaxations when subjected to a stress too small to induce any plastic flow. To identify the physical origin of this viscoelastic…
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are a promising material for creating controllable actuators for use in micro-scale devices, since they expand and contract significantly (absorbing or expelling fluid) in response to relatively small temperature…
Using molecular dynamics computer simulations we investigate the aging dynamics of a gel. We start from a fractal structure generated by the DLCA-DEF algorithm, onto which we then impose an interaction potential consisting of a short-range…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
Aging in an attraction-driven colloidal glass is studied by computer simulations. The system is equilibrated without attraction and instantaneously ``quenched'', at constant colloid volume fraction, to one of two states beyond the glass…
A swollen phase, in which the mean repeat distance of lipid bilayers is larger than the other phases, is found between the liquid-crystalline phase and the interdigitated gel phase in DPPC aqueous solution. Temperature, pressure and ethanol…
Hydrodynamics and confinement dominate bacterial mobility near solid or air-water boundaries, causing flagellated bacteria to move in circular trajectories. This phenomenon results from the counter-rotation between the bacterial body and…
Synthetic Laponite-clay particles with platelet-like shape display strong aging when dispersed in aqueous solutions, preventing latter from reaching their natural liquid-crystalline equilibrium state. Here we introduce a facile method that…
The solidity of glassy materials is believed to be due to the cage formed around each particle by its neighbors, but in reality the details of cage-formation remain elusive [1-4]. This cage starts to be formed at the onset…
Gels are used to design bilayered structures with high residual stresses. The swelling of a thin layer on a compliant substrate leads to compressive stresses. The post-buckling of this layer is investigated experimentally; the wavelengths…
Swelling is a volumetric-growth process in which a porous material expands by spontaneous imbibition of additional pore fluid. Swelling is distinct from other growth processes in that it is inherently poromechanical: Local expansion of the…
We present a Landau type theory for the non-linear elasticity of biopolymer gels with a part of the order parameter describing induced nematic order of fibers in the gel. We attribute the non-linear elastic behavior of these materials to…
From soft polymeric gels to hardened cement paste, amorphous solids under constant load exhibit a pronounced time-dependent deformation called creep. The microscopic mechanism of such a phenomenon is poorly understood in amorphous materials…
Phase separation of various materials has been studied for one and a half centuries. In the last two decades, phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids has received enormous attention, due its relevance to cellular functions. However,…
Self-assembly is the autonomous organization of components into patterns or structures: an essential ingredient of biology and a desired route to complex organization. At equilibrium, the structure is encoded through specific interactions,…
In a density-imbalanced bilayer Wigner crystal, where the ratio of electron densities in separate layers deviates slightly from unity, defects spontaneously form in one or both layers in the ground state of the system. Due to quantum…
From microactuators to biological tissues, non-porous materials with the ability to strongly expand when in contact with a solvent are ubiquitous. Consequently, the swelling of polymer systems such as hydrogel has received recently much…
The aging dynamics of colloidal suspensions of Laponite, a synthetic clay, is investigated using dynamic light stattering (DLS) and viscometry after a quench into the glassy phase. DLS allows to follow the diffusion of Laponite particles…
During development, organisms acquire three-dimensional shapes with important physiological consequences. While the basic mechanisms underlying morphogenesis are known in eukaryotes, it is often difficult to manipulate them in vivo. To…