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Spatial ordering of matter elicits exotic properties sometimes absent from a material's constituents. A few highly mineralised natural materials achieve high toughness through delocalised damage, whereas synthetic particulate composites…
It has long been known that disorder, perturbing the energy landscape of magnetic systems, can introduce glassy dynamics. However, the controlled role of increasing disorder in driving glass formation remains difficult to isolate in…
The structural relaxation of amorphous materials is described as arising from the superposition of elementary processes with varying activation energies. We show that it is possible to obtain the kinetic parameters of these processes from…
The postulate of the existence of a jamming phase diagram (Liu and Nagel, Nature 396, 21 EP (1998aa)) provides a theoretical basis for the classification of a wide range of amorphous solids (colloidal, molecular and emulsion glasses,…
Two classes of non-linear elastic materials are derived via two-dimensional homogenization. These materials are equivalent to a periodic grid of axially-deformable and axially-preloaded structural elements, subject to incremental…
Impact of a droplet on an undercooled surface is a complex phenomenon as it simultaneously instigates several physical processes that cover a broad spectrum of transport phenomena and phase-transition. Here, we report and explain an…
Internal activity can fundamentally reshape the mechanical behavior of solids, yet its role in softening and failure remains incompletely understood. In this study, we investigate spontaneous deformations in activated solids via non-affine…
\textit{Ab initio} random structure searching based on density functional theory is used to determine the ground-state structures of ice at high pressures. Including estimates of lattice zero-point energies, ice is found to adopt three…
Gas hydrates grown at gas-ice interfaces are examined by electron microscopy and found to have a submicron porous texture. Permeability of the intervening hydrate layers provides the connection between the two counterparts (gas and water…
Two-dimensional materials can be crafted with structural precision approaching the atomic scale, enabling quantum defects-by-design. These defects are frequently described as artificial atoms and are emerging optically-addressable spin…
Metallic rugate structures are theoretically investigated for achieving perfect absorption in the visible and near-infrared regions. Our model builds on nanoporous metal films whose porosity (volume fraction of voids) follows a sine-wave…
Controlling anisotropy in self-assembled structures enables engineering of materials with highly directional response. Here, we harness the anisotropic growth of ice walls in a thermal gradient to assemble an anisotropic refractory metal…
Targeting specific technological applications requires the control of nanoparticle properties, especially the crystalline polymorph. Freezing a nanodroplet deposited on a solid substrate leads to the formation of crystalline structures. We…
The behavior of cross-linking polymer solutions as they transition from liquid-like to solid-like material in flow determines success or failure in several applications. Dilute polymer solutions flow easily, while concentrated polymers or…
Achieving control and tunability of lyotropic materials has been a long-standing goal of liquid crystal research. Here we show that the elasticity of a liquid crystal system consisting of a dense suspension of semiflexible biopolymers can…
Crystallization from an amorphous atomic structure is usually seen as a spontaneous process in pursuit of a lower energy state, but for alloy systems it is often hard to elucidate because of the intrinsic structural and compositional…
Synchronization occurs ubiquitously in nature and science. The synchronization regions generally broaden monotonically with the strength of the forcing, thereby featuring a tongue-like shape in parameter space, known as Arnold's tongue.…
Grains of ice are formed spontaneously when water vapor is injected into a weakly-ionized laboratory plasma in which the background gas has been cooled to cryogenic temperatures comparable to those of deep space. These ice grains are…
An approach to homogenization of high porosity metallic foams is explored. The emphasis is on the \Alporas{} foam and its representation by means of two-dimensional wire-frame models. The guaranteed upper and lower bounds on the effective…
Colloidal gels are widely applied in industry due to their rheological character -- no flow takes place below the yield stress. Such property enables gels to maintain uniform distribution in practical formulations; otherwise, solid…