Related papers: Perspectives on opportunities in experimental soft…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
Self-assembly in natural and synthetic molecular systems can create complex aggregates or materials whose properties and functionality rises from their internal structure and molecular arrangement. The key microscopic features that control…
Surface roughness is a key factor when it comes to friction and wear, as well as to other physical properties. These phenomena are controlled by mechanisms acting at small scales, in which the topography of apparently-flat surfaces is…
Quasicrystals whose building blocks are of mesoscopic rather than atomic scale have recently been discovered in several soft-matter systems. Contrary to metallurgic quasicrystals whose source of stability remains a question of great debate…
Spontaneous self-assembly in molecular systems is a fundamental route to both biological and engineered soft matter. Simple micellisation, emulsion formation, and polymer mixing principles are well understood. However, the principles behind…
Biological soft tissues exhibit elastic properties which can be dramatically different from rubber-type materials (elastomers). To gain a better understanding of the role of constitutive relationships in determining material responses under…
Low-dimensional electron systems fabricated from quantum matter have in recent years become available and are being explored with great intensity. This article gives an overview of the fundamental properties of such systems and summarizes…
This review provides an introduction to the essential physics of soft adhesion, including the thermodynamics of adhesion and wetting, the mechanics of contact with deformable materials, and the material properties that most affect…
In this paper, we present a 2D numerical model developed to simulate the dynamics of soft, deformable particles. To accommodate significant particle deformations, the particle surface is represented as a narrow shell composed of mass points…
When atoms come together and bond, we call these new states molecules, and their properties determine many aspects of our daily life. Strangely enough, it is conceivable for light and molecules to bond, creating new hybrid light-matter…
Hyperuniform states of matter are correlated systems that are characterized by an anomalous suppression of long-wavelength (i.e., large-length-scale) density fluctuations compared to those found in garden-variety disordered systems, such as…
Local positional disorder in soft, anharmonic materials has emerged as a central factor in shaping their electronic, vibrational, optical, and transport properties. Viewed mainly as a source of performance degradation, recent theoretical…
A new frontier in the search for dark matter (DM) is based on the idea of detecting the decoherence caused by DM scattering against a mesoscopic superposition of normal matter. Such superpositions are uniquely sensitive to very small…
Soft robotics is an emerging field of research where the robot body is composed of compliant and soft materials. It allows the body to bend, twist, and deform to move or to adapt its shape to the environment for grasping, all of which are…
Neutrons and x-rays are coherent probes, and their coherent properties are used in scattering experiments. Only coherent scattering probes can elucidate collective molecular motions. While phonons in crystals were studied for half a century…
There is a strong possibility that the particles making up the dark matter in the Universe have a mass below 1 eV and in many important situations exhibit a wave-like behavior. Amongst the candidates the axion stands out as particularly…
Soft matter materials, such as polymers, membranes, proteins, are often electrically charged. This makes them water soluble, which is of great importance in technological application and a prerequisite for biological function. We discuss a…
This paper summarizes the physical mechanisms that encode the type and quantity of cosmological matter in the properties of large-scale structure, and reviews the application of such tests to current datasets. The key lengths of the horizon…
Motivated by inflation, the theory of big-bang nucleosynthesis and the quest for a deeper understanding of the fundamental forces and particles, a very successful paradigm for the development of structure in the Universe has evolved. It…
Soft particles such as microgels and core-shell particles can undergo significant and anisotropic deformations when adsorbed to a liquid interface. This, in turn, leads to a complex phase behavior upon compression. Here we develop a…