Related papers: Adaptive Elastic Networks as models of supercooled…
Super-cooled liquids are characterized by their fragility: the slowing down of the dynamics under cooling is more sudden and the jump of specific heat at the glass transition is generally larger in fragile liquids than in strong ones.…
Many organisms have an elastic skeleton that consists of a closed shell of epithelial cells that is filled with fluid, and can actively regulate both elastic forces in the shell and hydrostatic pressure inside it. In this work we introduce…
Athermal models of disordered fibrous networks are highly useful for studying the mechanics of elastic networks composed of stiff biopolymers. The underlying network architecture is a key aspect that can affect the elastic properties of…
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…
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…
Diffusivity, a measure for how rapidly a fluid self-mixes, shows an intimate, but seemingly fragmented, connection to thermodynamics. On one hand, the "configurational" contribution to entropy (related to the number of mechanically-stable…
Glass formers exhibit a viscoelastic behavior: at the laboratory timescale, they behave like (glassy) solids at low temperatures, and like liquids at high temperatures. Based on this observation, elastic models relate the long time…
Ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of liquid water under equilibrium ambient conditions, together with a novel energy decomposition analysis, have recently shown that a substantial fraction of water molecules exhibit a significant…
Attractive colloidal gels exhibit solid-like behavior at vanishingly small fractions of solids, owing to ramified space-spanning networks that form due to particle-particle interactions. These networks give the gel its rigidity, and as the…
As liquids approach the glass transition temperature, dynamical heterogeneity emerges as a crucial universal feature of their behavior. Dynamic facilitation, where local motion triggers further motion nearby, plays a major role in this…
We examine the behavior of the diffusion coefficient of the ST2 model of water over a broad region of the phase diagram via molecular dynamics simulations. The ST2 model has an accessible liquid-liquid transition between low-density and…
We study the elasticity of cross-linked networks of thermally fluctuating stiff polymers. As compared to their purely mechanical counterparts, it is shown that these thermal networks have a qualitatively different elastic response. By…
In equilibrium and supercooled liquids, polymorphism is manifested by thermodynamic regions defined in the phase diagram, which are predominantly of different short- and medium-range order (local structure). It is found that on the phase…
Understanding the relationship between the microscopic structure and topology of a material and its macroscopic properties is a fundamental challenge across a wide range of systems. Here, we investigate the viscoelasticity of DNA nanostar…
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 introduce a new measure of the structure of a liquid which is the softness of the mean-field potential developed by us earlier. We find that this softness is sensitive to small changes in the structure. We then study its correlation with…
The most profound effect of disorder on the elastic response of solids is the nonaffinity of local displacements whereby the atoms (particles, network junctions) do not simply follow the macroscopic strain, as they do in perfect crystals,…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
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…
The elastic response of mechanical, chemical, and biological systems is often modeled using a discrete arrangement of Hookean springs, either representing finite material elements or even the molecular bonds of a system. However, to date,…