Related papers: Hydrogel menisci: Shape, interaction, and instabil…
A nematic liquid-crystal gel is a macroscopically homogeneous elastic medium with the rotational symmetry of a nematic liquid crystal. In this paper, we develop a general approach to the study of these gels that incorporates all underlying…
The elastic deformation of a soft solid induced by capillary forces crucially relies on the excess stress inside the solid-liquid interface. While for a liquid-liquid interface this "surface stress" is strictly identical to the "surface…
When a gel absorbs solvent from surrounding, stress field is created in the gel, and this causes complex dynamics of the swelling behavior. Here we study this effect for disk-shaped gel by rigorously solving the diffusio-mechanical coupling…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
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…
The usefulness of glasses, and particularly of metallic glasses, in technological applications is often limited by their toughness, which is defined as the area under the stress vs. strain curve before plastic yielding. Recently toughness…
Recent experiments have shown that liquid drops on highly deformable substrates exhibit mutual interactions. This is similar to the Cheerios effect, the capillary interaction of solid particles at a liquid interface, but now the roles of…
We study the response to shear deformations of packings of long spherocylindrical particles that interact via frictional forces with friction coefficient $\mu$. The packings are produced and deformed with the help of molecular dynamics…
The macroscopic mechanical properties of densely packed coagulated colloidal particle gels strongly depend on the local arrangement of the powder particles on length scales of a few particle diameters. Heterogeneous microstructures exhibit…
Soft particles suspended in fluids flowing through microchannels are often encountered in biological flows such as cells in vessels. They can deform under flow or when subject to mechanical stresses as they interact with themselves.…
Materials that can be deformed by thermal stresses at room temperature are called soft materials. Colloidal suspensions comprising solid particles evenly distributed in a fluid phase (smoke, fog, ink and milk, for example),…
The dynamics of receding contact lines is investigated experimentally through controlled perturbations of a meniscus in a dip coating experiment. We first characterize stationary menisci and their breakdown at the coating transition. It is…
In the classic theory of solid adhesion, surface energy drives deformation to increase contact area while bulk elasticity opposes it. Recently, solid surface stress has been shown also to play an important role in opposing deformation of…
In this study, micro-droplets are placed on thin, glassy, free-standing films where the Laplace pressure of the droplet deforms the free-standing film, creating a bulge. The film's tension is modulated by changing temperature continuously…
Thermal fluctuations strongly modify the large length-scale elastic behavior of crosslinked membranes, giving rise to scale-dependent elastic moduli. While thermal effects in flat membranes are well understood, many natural and artificial…
Transport phenomena in complex and dynamic microscopic environments are fundamentally shaped by hydrodynamic interactions. In particular, microparticle transport in porous media is governed by the delicate interplay between…
Morphogenetic dynamics of tissue sheets require coordinated cell shape changes regulated by global patterning of mechanical forces. Inspired by such biological phenomena, we propose a minimal mechanochemical model based on the notion that…
A numerical study of multi-phase granular materials based upon micro-mechanical modelling is proposed. Discrete element simulations are used to investigate capillary induced effects on the friction properties of a granular assembly in the…
Via numerical simulations and analytical calculations, depletion forces are studied in mixtures of small and big particles that interact via soft repulsive potentials. While big particles are spherical, small particles are nonspherical with…
Garc\'ia-Aguilar et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett 126, 038001 (2021)] have shown that the deformations of "shape-shifting droplets" are consistent with an elastic model, that, unlike previous models, includes the intrinsic curvature of the frozen…