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The kinetics of phase transition processes often governs the resulting material microstruc-ture. Using optical microscopy, we here investigate the formation and stabilization of a po-rous crystalline microstructure forming in low-salt…

Mechanical reliability plays an outsized role in determining the durability of flexible electronic devices because of the significant mechanical stresses they can experience during manufacturing and operation. These devices are typically…

This paper considers the effect of electrostatics on the stability of a charged membrane. We show that at low ionic strength and high surface charge density, repulsion between charges on the membrane renders it unstable to the formation of…

We report, for the first time, some experimental observations regarding a new type of long range interaction between rigid particles that prevails when they are suspended in an soft elastic gel. A denser particle submerges itself to a…

Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…

Plasticity in soft amorphous materials typically involves collective deformation patterns that emerge upon intense shearing. The microscopic basis of amorphous plasticity has been commonly established through the notion of "Eshelby"-type…

Attractive colloidal gels display a solid-to-fluid transition as shear stresses above the yield stress are applied. This shear-induced transition is involved in virtually any application of colloidal gels. It is also crucial for controlling…

The capillary traction of a liquid contact line causes highly localized deformations in soft solids, tremendously slowing down wetting and dewetting dynamics by viscoelastic braking. Enforcing nonetheless large velocities leads to the…

The rheological properties of biological tissues are core to processes such as cancer metastasis, wound healing and embryo development. The emergence of tissue and organ structures during morphogenesis requires the precise formation of…

Fatigue can cause materials that undergo cyclic loading to experience brittle failure at much lower stresses than under monotonic loading. We propose that the lithospheres of icy satellites could become fatigued and thus weakened by…

In this letter, structural rigidity concepts are used to understand the origin of instabilities in granular aggregates. It is shown that: a) The contact network of a noncohesive granular aggregate becomes exactly isostatic in the limit of…

Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…

We investigate the crumpling of a sheet as it is repeatedly crushed onto itself by rolling it into a cylinder and twisting it axially while allowing the end-to-end length to evolve freely. As deduced from its plastic deformations, the sheet…

Field-induced assembly of colloidal particles into structures of desired configurations is extremely relevant from the viewpoint of producing field-assembled micro-swimmers and reconfigurable smart materials. However, the behaviour of…

Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While stress-strain curves for a wide range of temperature can be fit to the functional form predicted by entropic network models, many other…

The fundamental instability responsible for the shear localization which results in shear bands in amorphous solids remains unknown despite enormous amount of research, both experimental and theoretical. As this is the main mechanism for…

In this article, we present a mathematical model that answers a classical question concerning how much force, which is generally called static friction force, will it require to initiate the motion of a soft solid block such as gel, rubber…

We develop a theory for drying-induced stresses in sessile, poroelastic drops undergoing evaporation on rigid surfaces. Using a lubrication-like approximation, the governing equations of three-dimensional nonlinear poroelasticity are…

We use large-scale computer simulations to explore the non-equilibrium aging dynamics in a microscopic model for colloidal gels. We find that gelation resulting from a kinetically-arrested phase separation is accompanied by `anomalous'…

Utilizing colloidal probe, lateral force microscopy and simultaneous confocal microscopy, combined with finite element analysis, we investigate the mechanism of static friction for a microparticle on a soft, adhesive surface. We find that…