Related papers: Perspectives on opportunities in experimental soft…
The physics of glasses can be studied from many viewpoints, from material scientists interested in the development of new materials to statistical physicists inventing new theoretical tools to deal with disordered systems. In these lectures…
Living things avoid equilibrium using molecular machines. Such microscopic soft-matter objects encounter relatively large friction and fluctuations. We discuss design principles for effective molecular machine operation in this unfamiliar…
Soft matter consists of meso-scale (nm~{\mu}m) structures that are formed by weak interactions and reorganized under thermal fluctuations. The resulting complex relaxation phenomena may be probed with microrheology, by observing the…
Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materials often result in…
We study stability and structure of quark matters as a function of density in a framework of molecular dynamics (MD). Using appropriate effective interactions and the frictional cooling method, we search for the minimum energy of the…
The generic properties of compact objects made of two different fluids of dark matter are studied in a scale invariant approach. We investigate compact objects with a core-shell structure, where the two fluids are separated, and with mixed…
Deployable structures, essential across various engineering applications ranging from umbrellas to satellites, are evolving to include soft, morphable designs where geometry drives transformation. However, a major challenge for soft…
We employ molecular dynamics simulations to explore how internal flexibility affects phase transitions in soft-matter systems composed of dimers interacting via a core-softened potential with two characteristic length scales. Monomers are…
Complex molecules are intriguing objects at the interface between quantum and classical phenomena. Compared to the electrons, neutrons, or atoms studied in earlier matter-wave experiments, they feature a much more complicated internal…
Mechanical metamaterials are engineered materials that gain their remarkable mechanical properties, such as negative Poisson's ratios, negative compressibility, phononic bandgaps, and topological phonon modes, from their structure rather…
The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…
A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…
We consider a dilute system of small hard beads or hard fibers immersed in a very soft gel able to withstand large elastic deformations. Because of its low to very low shear modulus, this system is very sensitive to small forces. We…
Models which allow an explicit application to structurally modulated substances are reviewed within the frame of a symmetry-based approach starting from discrete lattice theory. Focus is set on models formulated in terms of local variables…
We study the elastic properties of soft solids containing air bubbles. Contrary to standard porous materials, the softness of the matrix allows for a coupling of the matrix elasticity to surface tension forces brought in by the bubbles.…
We discuss the damping of primordial dark matter fluctuations, taking into account explicitly the interactions of dark matter - whatever their intensity - both with itself and with other particle species. Relying on a general classification…
[A brief review intended for a general physics colloquium audience.] Astrophysicists now know that 80% of the matter in the universe is `dark matter', composed of neutral and weakly interacting elementary particles that are not part of the…
Extra-large deformations in ultra-soft elastic materials are ubiquitous, yet systematic studies and methods to understand the mechanics of such huge strains are lacking. Here we investigate this complex problem systematically with a simple…
Why are materials with specific characteristics more abundant than others? This is a fundamental question in materials science and one that is traditionally difficult to tackle, given the vastness of compositional and configurational space.…
Bulk-boundary correspondence is the emergence of features at the boundary of a material that are dependent on and yet distinct from the properties of the bulk of the material. The diverse applications of this idea in topological insulators…