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The objective of this thesis is to advance the understanding of complex physical phenomena through the lens of statistical physics. Specifically, it addresses two fundamental questions: What types of interactions can induce buckling of…
This paper presents a theory for the behaviour of isotropic-hardening/softening elastoplastic materials that do not have a preferred reference configuration. In spite of important differences, many ingredients of classical plasticity are…
The flow of amorphous solids results from a combination of elastic deformation and local structural rearrangements, which induce non-local elastic deformations. These elements are incorporated into a mechanically-consistent mesoscopic model…
Embedding magnetic colloidal particles in an elastic polymer matrix leads to smart soft materials that can reversibly be addressed from outside by external magnetic fields. We discover a pronounced nonlinear superelastic stress-strain…
We show that a viscoelastic thin sheet driven out of equilibrium by active structural remodelling develops a rich variety of shapes as a result of a competition between viscous relaxation and activity. In the regime where active processes…
Active materials are capable of converting free energy into directional motion, giving rise to striking dynamical phenomena. Developing a general understanding of their structure in relation to the underlying non-equilibrium physics would…
The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…
Auxetic materials become thicker rather than thinner when stretched, exhibiting an unusual negative Poisson's ratio well suited for designing shape transforming metamaterials. Current auxetic designs, however, are often monostable and…
Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic,…
Silicon-oxygen compounds are among the most important ones in the natural sciences, occurring as building blocks in minerals and being used in semiconductors and catalysis. Beyond the well known silicon dioxide, there are phases with…
The buckling of a soft elastic sample under growth or swelling has highlighted a new interest in materials science, morphogenesis, and biology or physiology. Indeed, the change of mass or volume is a common fact of any living species, and…
Hierarchical structures are very common in Nature, but only recently have they been systematically studied in materials physics, in order to understand the specific effects they can have on the mechanical properties of various systems.…
Material renewability in active living systems, such as in cells and tissues, can drive the large-scale patterning of forces, with distinctive phenotypic consequences. This is especially significant in the cell cytoskeleton, where multiple…
The macroscopic properties of polymeric fluids are inherited from the material properties of the fibers embedded in the solvent. The behavior of such passive fibers in flow has been of interest in a wide range of systems, including cellular…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
Soft elastic filaments that can be stretched, bent and twisted exhibit a range of topologically and geometrically complex morphologies that include plectonemes, solenoids, knot-like and braid-like structures. We combine numerical…
The metallurgy and materials communities have long known and exploited fundamental links between chemical and structural ordering in metallic solids and their mechanical properties. The highest reported strength achievable through the…
In this article, we introduce a framework to investigate the growth of nano-crystallites in a polymer matrix numerically. This framework combines the Flory theory of entropic elasticity with phase-field approaches commonly used to model…
Localized deformation patterns are a common motif in morphogenesis and are increasingly finding widespread applications in materials science, for instance as memory devices. Here we describe the emergence of spatially localized deformations…
We use numerical simulations to study the dynamics of dense assemblies of self-propelled particles in the limit of extremely large, but finite, persistence times. In this limit, the system evolves intermittently between mechanical…