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Vitrimers are polymer networks that, thanks to covalent bond exchange, combine desirable properties of thermoplastic and thermosets, such as flowability and insolubility. For this reason, vitrimers are considered to be good candidates for a…
Whereas for strings, higher-order empirical entropy is the standard entropy measure, several different notions of empirical entropy for trees have been proposed in the past, notably label entropy, degree entropy, conditional versions of the…
Electroactive polymers are smart materials that can be used as actuators, sensors, or energy harvesters. We focus on a pseudo trilayer based on PEDOT, a semiconductor polymer: the central part consists of two interpenetrating polymers and…
Encouraging student engagement is a key aim in any educational setting, and allowing students the freedom to pursue their own methods of solving problems through independent experimentation has been shown to markedly improve this. In many…
Characterizing the entropy of a system is a crucial, and often computationally costly, step in understanding its thermodynamics. It plays a key role in the study of phase transitions, pattern formation, protein folding and more. Current…
Nematic elastomers and glasses deform spontaneously when subjected to temperature changes. This property can be exploited in the design of heterogeneously patterned thin sheets that deform into a non-trivial shape when heated or cooled. In…
The entropy of a system gives a powerful insight into its microscopic degrees of freedom, however standard experimental ways of measuring entropy through heat capacity are hard to apply in mesoscale and nanoscale systems, as they require…
Living systems operate far from thermal equilibrium by converting the chemical potential of ATP into mechanical work to achieve growth, replication or locomotion. Given time series observations of intra-, inter- or multicellular processes,…
Entanglement is not only the resource that fuels many quantum technologies but also plays a key role for some of the most profound open questions of fundamental physics. Experiments controlling quantum systems at the single quantum level…
For many of the physical phenomena around us, we have developed sophisticated models explaining their behavior. Nevertheless, measuring physical properties from visual observations is challenging due to the high number of causally…
The theory of disordered elastic systems is one of the most powerful frameworks to assess the physics of multiple systems that span from ferromagnets to migrating biological cells. In this formalism, one assumes that the system can be…
The glass transition is considered within two toys models, a mean field spin glass and a directed polymer in a correlated random potential. In the spin glass model there occurs a dynamical transition, where the system condenses in a state…
The elasticity of rubbery polymer networks has been considered to be entropy-driven. On the other hand, studies on single polymer chain mechanics have revealed that the elasticity of ultimately stretched polymer chains is dominated by the…
Structural glasses prepared by bulk quenching a liquid melt universally exhibit puzzling low-energy excitations commonly known as the ``two-level systems'' (TLSs). Recent studies indicate that ultrastable glassy films made by vapor…
Entanglement is the key feature of many-body quantum systems, and the development of new tools to probe it in the laboratory is an outstanding challenge. Measuring the entropy of different partitions of a quantum system provides a way to…
Mechanical characteristics of single biological cells are used to identify and possibly leverage interesting differences among cells or cell populations. Fluidity---hysteresivity normalized to the extremes of an elastic solid or a viscous…
Polymeric materials are widely used in many applications and are especially useful when combined with other polymers to make polymer composites. The appealing features of these materials come from their having comparable levels of strength…
Technological advances offer the possibility of using mobile devices to enrich learning environments with multimedia content. Although physical experiments play a key role in science learning, little is known about integrating multimedia…
The 'elastic capacitor' (EC) model was first introduced in studies of lipid bilayers (the major components of biological membranes). This electro-elastic model accounted for the compression of a membrane under applied voltage and allowed…
The concept of Entropy plays a key role in Information Theory, Statistics, and Machine Learning.This paper introduces a new entropy measure, called the t-entropy, which exploits the concavity of the inverse-tan function. We analytically…