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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,…
Understanding the role played by the microstructure of materials on their macroscopic failure properties is an important challenge in solid mechanics. Indeed, when a crack propagates at a heterogeneous brittle interface, the front is…
Microstructural evolution in structural materials is known to occur in response to mechanical loading and can often accommodate substantial plastic deformation through the coupled motion of grain boundaries (GBs). This can produce desirable…
The paper addresses the problem of a Mode III interfacial crack advancing quasi-statically in a heterogeneous composite material, that is a two-phase material containing elastic inclusions, both soft and stiff, and defects, such as…
Magnetron sputtered titanium nitride (TiN) thin films are widely used as protective coatings due to their high hardness, but suffer from inherent brittleness and low fracture toughness, limiting their applicability. The multilayering of TiN…
A confined incompressible elastic film does not deform uniformly when subjected to adhesive interfacial stresses but with undulations which have a characteristic wavelength scaling linearly with the thickness of the film. In the classical…
We study the nucleation and development of crack patterns in thin composite fibers under tension in this work. A fiber comprises an elastic core and an outer layer of a weaker brittle material. In recent tensile experiments on such…
The effect of rigid inclusions on the phase behavior of a film containing a mixture of lipid molecules is investigated. In the proposed model, the inclusion-induced deformation of the film, and the resulting energy cost are strongly…
We describe an optical scattering study of grain boundary premelting in water ice. Ubiquitous long ranged attractive polarization forces act to suppress grain boundary melting whereas repulsive forces originating in screened Coulomb…
Biofilms are antibiotic-resistant bacterial aggregates that grow on moist surfaces and can trigger hospital-acquired infections. They provide a classical example in biology where the dynamics of cellular communities may be observed and…
We discuss instabilities of fluid films of nanoscale thickness, with a particular focus on films where the destabilising mechanism allows for linear instability, metastability, and absolute stability. Our study is motivated by nematic…
Printing of metallic films has been preferred for roll-to-roll processes over vacuum technologies due to faster processing times and lower processing costs. Films can be produced by depositing inks containing suspended metallic particles…
Systematic exploration of amorphous ABC heterostructures revealed that nanoscale morphological modifications markedly improved their artificial bulk second-order susceptibility. These amorphous birefringent heterostructures were fabricated…
Finite-thickness effects are analyzed theoretically for the plasma frequency and associated dielectric response function of plasmonic films formed by periodically aligned, infinitely thin, identical metallic cylinders. The plasma frequency…
The formation of pyramid-like structures in thin-film growth on substrates with a quadratic symmetry, e.g., {001} surfaces, is shown to exhibit anisotropic scaling as there exist two length scales with different time dependences. Analytical…
Self-assembled nano and micro-structures, particularly those capable of responsive erasure and regeneration, have garnered significant interest for their applications in smart photonics and electronics. However, current techniques for…
Thin adhesive films can be removed from substrates, torn, and folded in distinct geometries under external driving forces. In two-dimensional materials, however, these processes can be self-driven as shown in previous studies on folded…
Structural transformations at interfaces are of profound fundamental interest as complex examples of phase transitions in low-dimensional systems. Despite decades of extensive research, no compelling evidence exists for structural…
We demonstrate that surface morphogenesis in compressed thin films may result from spatially correlated plastic activity. A soft glassy film strongly adhering to a smooth and rigid substrate and subjected to uniaxial compression, indeed,…
The properties of polycrystalline materials are often dominated by the size of their grains and by the atomic structure of their grain boundaries. These effects should be especially pronounced in 2D materials, where even a line defect can…