Related papers: On the difference between stiff and soft membranes…
Live cells have ambiguous mechanical properties. They were often described as either elastic solids or viscoelastic fluids and have recently been classified as soft glassy materials characterized by weak power-law rheology. Nonlinear…
The mechanical response of cellular materials with spinodal topologies is numerically and experimentally investigated. Spinodal microstructures are generated by the numerical solution of the Cahn-Hilliard equation. Two different topologies…
Solids deform and fluids flow, but soft glassy materials, such as emulsions, foams, suspensions, and pastes, exhibit an intricate mix of solid and liquid-like behavior. While much progress has been made to understand their elastic (small…
When a thin elastic sheet is confined to a region much smaller than its size the morphology of the resulting crumpled membrane is a network of straight ridges or folds that meet at sharp vertices. A virial theorem predicts the ratio of the…
Two cylinders rotating next to each other generate a large hydrodynamic force if the intermediate space is filled with a viscous fluid. Herein, we explore the case where the cylinders are separated by two layers of viscous immiscible…
Membranes are of great technological and biological as well as theoretical interest. Two main classes of membranes can be distinguished: Fluid membranes and polymerized, tethered membranes. Here, we review progress in the theoretical…
The elastic deformation of a soft solid induced by capillary forces crucially relies on the excess stress inside the solid-liquid interface. While for a liquid-liquid interface this "surface stress" is strictly identical to the "surface…
Viscoelastic stress relaxation is a basic characteristic of soft matter systems such as colloids, gels, and biological networks. Although the Maxwell model of linear viscoelasticity provides a classical description of stress relaxation, the…
We investigate the properties of membranes under tension by Monte-Carlo simulations of a generic coarse-grained model for lipid bilayers. We give a comprising overview of the behavior of several membrane characteristics, such as the area…
An increasing variety of crystal structures has been observed in soft condensed matter over the past two decades, surpassing most expectations for the diversity of arrangements accessible through classical driving forces. Here, we survey…
We revisit here the stability of a deformable interface that separates a fully-developed turbulent gas flow from a thin layer of laminar liquid. Unlike previous work, the turbulent base state velocity profile proposed here requires only a…
How long a fluid membrane vesicle stressed with a steady ramp of micropipette last before rupture? Or conversely, how high the surface tension should be to rupture a membrane? To answer these challenging questions we have developed a…
We use coarse-grained Monte Carlo simulations to study the elastic properties of charged membranes in solutions of monovalent and pentavalent counterions. The simulation results of the two cases reveal trends opposite to each other. The…
Lubrication flows appear in many applications in engineering, biophysics, and in nature. Separation of surfaces and minimisation of friction and wear is achieved when the lubrication fluid builds up a lift force. In this paper we analyse…
The detachment dynamics of a fluid membrane with an isotropic spontaneous curvature from a flat substrate are studied by using meshless membrane simulations. The membrane is detached from an open edge leading to vesicle formation. With…
Soft condensed matter physics is the study of materials, such as fluids, liquid crystals, polymers, colloids, and emulsions, that are ``soft" to the touch. This article will review some properties, such as the dominance of entropy, that are…
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…
A nematic membrane is a sheet with embedded orientational order, which can occur in biological cells, liquid crystal films, manufactured materials, and other soft matter systems. By formulating the free energy of nematic films using tensor…
Fluid membranes made out of lipid bilayers are the fundamental separation structure in eukaryotic cells. Many physiological processes rely on dramatic shape and topological changes (e.g. fusion, fission) of fluid membrane systems. Fluidity…
Variable stiffness is a key capability in biological and robotic systems, enabling adaptive interaction across tasks and environments. Mechanical metamaterials offer an alternative to conventional mechatronic solutions by encoding stiffness…