Related papers: Mechanical Self-Assembly of a Strain-Engineered Fl…
An elastic membrane that is forced to reside in a container smaller than its natural size will deform and, upon further volume reduction, eventually crumple. The crumpled state is characterized by the localization of energy in a complex…
The exceptional mechanical properties of graphene have made it attractive for nano-mechanical devices and functional composite materials. Two key aspects of graphene's mechanical behavior are its elastic and adhesive properties. These are…
Nematic elastomers are rubbery solids which have liquid crystals incorporated into their polymer chains. These materials display many unusual mechanical properties, one such being the ability to form fine-scale microstructure. In this work,…
In the context of finite elasticity, we propose plate models describing the spontaneous bending of nematic elastomer thin films due to variations along the thickness of the nematic order parameters. Reduced energy functionals are deduced…
The electronic properties of two-dimensional materials and their heterostructures can be dramatically altered by varying the relative angle between the layers. This makes it theoretically possible to realize a new class of twistable…
The self-assembly of polymer grafted nanoparticles is more and more used in the field of functional materials. However, there is still a lack of analysis on the dynamic transformation paths of different self-assembly morphologies, which…
The processing of thin-structured materials in a fluidic environment, from nearly inextensible but flexible graphene sheets to highly extensible polymer films, arises in many applications. So far, little is known about the dynamics of such…
Mechanical metamaterials are periodic lattice structures with complex unit cell architectures that can achieve extraordinary mechanical properties beyond the capability of bulk materials. A new class of metamaterials is proposed, whose…
We study the behavior of thin elastic sheets that are bent and strained under the influence of weak, smooth confinement. We show that the emerging shapes exhibit the coexistence of two types of domains that differ in their characteristic…
Elastic sheets with macroscopic dimensions are easy to deform by bending and stretching. Yet shaping nanometric sheets by mechanical manipulation is hard. Here we show that nanoparticle self-assembly could be used to this end. We…
One of the fascinating properties of the new families of two-dimensional crystals is their high stretchability and the possibility to use external strain to manipulate, in a controlled manner, their optical and electronic properties. Strain…
A theoretical description of the weakly nonlinear and mode-dependent dynamics of a nanoscale beam that is under intrinsic tension is developed. A full analysis of the dynamic range of the beam over a wide range of conditions is presented.…
Helical ribbons arise in many biological and engineered systems, often driven by anisotropic surface stress, residual strain, and geometric or elastic mismatch between layers of a laminated composite. A full mathematical analysis is…
Organisms in nature, such as Cephalopods and Pachyderms, exploit stiffness modulation to achieve amazing dexterity in the control of their appendages. In this paper, we explore the phenomenon of layer jamming, which is a popular stiffness…
Wrinkling instabilities of thin elastic sheets can be used to generate periodic structures over a wide range of length scales. Viscosity of the thin elastic sheet or its surrounding medium has been shown to be responsible for dynamic…
Potential applications of monolayer of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) in optoelectronic and flexible devices are under heavy investigation. Although TMDs monolayers are highly robust to external mechanical fields, their electronic…
Internally generated active stresses drive soft materials into architectures inaccessible to thermal self-assembly. We use a microtubule-based active fluid to assemble and irreversibly restructure actin-fascin networks. Subsequently, we…
Two-dimensional (2D) layered materials hosting dislocations have attracted considerable research attention in recent years. In particular, screw dislocations can result in a spiral topology and an interlayer twist in the layered materials,…
Self-assembly is a fundamental concept in biology and of significant interest to nanotechnology. Significant progress has been made in characterizing and controlling the properties of the resulting structures, both experimentally and…
Strain engineering provides a powerful means to tune the properties of two-dimensional materials. Accordingly, numerous studies have investigated the effect of bi- and uniaxial strain. Yet, the strain fields in many systems such as…