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The discovery of configurational forces acting on elastic structures and its initial applications are reviewed. Configurational forces are related to the possibility that an elastic structure can change its configuration, thus inducing a…
Certain bacteria form filamentous colonies when the cells fail to separate after dividing. In Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus thermus, and cyanobacteria, the filaments can wrap into complex supercoiled structures as the cells grow. The…
The fragility (the abnormally strong temperature dependence of the viscosity) of highly viscous liquids is shown to have two sources. The first is the temperature dependence of the barriers between inherent states considered earlier. The…
The helical-flexo-electro-optic effect shows interesting in-plane electro-optic switching behaviour due to flexoelectric coupling with applied electric fields. Previous understanding of the behaviour has been generally based on an analytic…
We summarize some recent results of the authors and their collaborators, regarding the derivation of thin elastic shell models (for shells with mid-surface of arbitrary geometry) from the variational theory of 3d nonlinear elasticity. We…
Dislocations, as topological defects in crystal lattices, are fundamental to understanding plasticity in materials. Similar periodic structures also arise in continuum field theories, such as chiral soliton lattices (CSLs), which appear in…
Volume alteration in solid materials is a common cause of material failure. Here we investigate the crack formation in thin elastic layers attached to a substrate. We show that small variations in the volume contraction and substrate…
We study the force vs extension behaviour of a helical spring made of a thin torsionally-stiff anisotropic elastic rod. Our focus is on springs of very low helical pitch. For certain parameters of the problem such a spring is found not to…
Anomalous Hall crystals (AHCs) are exotic phases of matter that simultaneously break continuous translation symmetry and exhibit the quantum anomalous Hall effect. AHCs have recently been proposed to explain the observation of an integer…
We describe a geometrical property of helical structures and show how it accounts for the early art of ropemaking. Helices have a maximum number of rotations that can be added to them -- and it is shown that this is a geometrical feature,…
Despite being governed by the familiar laws of Hookean mechanics, elastic shells patterned with an internal structure (i.e. metashells) exhibit a wealth of unusual mechanical properties with no counterparts in unstructured materials. Here I…
A mobile Coulomb gas permeating a fixed background crystalline lattice of charged colloidal crystals is subject to an electrostatic-elastic coupling, which we study on the continuum level by introducing a minimal coupling between…
This paper presents numerical linear stability analysis of a cylindrical Taylor-Couette flow of liquid metal carrying axial electric current in a generally helical external magnetic field. Axially symmetric disturbances are considered in…
In the present work, the overall nonlinear elastic behavior of a 1D multi-modular structure incorporating possible imperfections at the discrete (micro-scale) level, is derived with respect to both tensile and compressive applied loads. The…
A rectangular plate of dielectric elastomer exhibiting gradients of material properties through its thickness will deform inhomogeneously when a potential difference is applied to compliant electrodes on its major surfaces, because each…
In this paper, we study several structural models of amorphous silicon, and discuss structural and electronic features common to all. We note spatial correlations between short bonds, and similar correlations between long bonds. Such…
We theoretically study the conformations of a helical semi-flexible filament confined to a flat surface. This squeezed helix exhibits a variety of unexpected shapes resembling circles, waves or spirals depending on the material parameters.…
Disordered viscoelastic materials are ubiquitous and exhibit fascinating invariant scaling properties. In a companion article, we have presented comprehensive new results for the critical behavior of the dynamic susceptibility of disordered…
Generic interactions e.g. the Coulomb or other long ranged radially symmetric repulsive interactions between monomers of bead-spring model of a semi-flexible polymer induce instabilities in a initially straight polymer chain to form long…
Using a carefully justified development of Debye-Huckel theory for highly asymmetric electrolytes, one finds that a region of expanded phase instability, or miscibility gap, can appear for charge-stabilised colloidal suspensions at high…