Related papers: Corners in soft solids behave as defects in crysta…
The physics of an electron solid, held on a cryogenic liquid surface by a pressing electric field, is examined in a low-density regime that has not been explored before. We consider the effect of the pressing field in distorting the surface…
Polycrystalline solids can exhibit material properties that differ significantly from those of equivalent single-crystal samples, in part, because of a spontaneous redistribution of mobile point defects into so-called space-charge regions…
The Leidenfrost effect occurs when an object near a hot surface vaporizes rapidly enough to lift itself up and hover. Although well-understood for liquids and stiff sublimable solids, nothing is known about the effect with materials whose…
Surface energies and surface elasticity largely affect the mechanical response of nanostructures as well as the physical phenomenon associated with surfaces such as evaporation and adsorption. Studying surface energies at finite…
We investigate the formation of polycrystalline structures in a class of particle systems. The atomistic energy is modeled as a sum of particle energies that favor atoms being locally isometric to a reference lattice. The discrete frame…
The equation of motions and the conditions on surfaces and edges between fluids and solids in presence of non-constant surface energies, as in the case of surfactants attached to the fluid particles at the interfaces, are revisited under…
We study the interplay of topological bottlenecks and energetic barriers to equilibration in a Coulomb spin liquid where a short-range energetic coupling between defects charged under an emergent gauge field supplements their entropic…
Soft solids with surface energy exhibit complex mechanical behavior, necessitating advanced constitutive models to capture the interplay between bulk and surface mechanics. This interplay has profound implications for material design and…
The mechanical properties of a solid, which relate its deformation to external applied forces, are key factors in enabling or disabling the use of an otherwise optimal material in any application, strongly influencing also its service…
Recent experiments have shown that surface stresses in soft materials can have a significant strain-dependence. Here we explore the implications of this surface elasticity to show how, and when, we expect it to arise. We develop the…
A ubiquitous motif in nature is the self-similar hierarchical buckling of a thin lamina near its margins. This is seen in leaves, flowers, fungi, corals, and marine invertebrates. We investigate this morphology from the perspective of…
In this survey article, we present two applications of surface curvatures in theoretical physics. The first application arises from biophysics in the study of the shape of cell vesicles involving the minimization of a mean curvature type…
The contribution of the smectic-nematic interface to the surface energy of a nematic liquid crystal sample is analyzed. By means of a simple model it is shown that the surface energy depends on the thickness of the region over which the…
The influence of the external pressure and surface energy on the wetting transition at nanotextured interfaces is studied using molecular dynamics and continuum simulations. The surface roughness of the composite interface is introduced via…
The Casimir force between macroscopic bodies is well understood, but not the Casimir stress inside bodies. Suppose empty space or a uniform medium meets a soft wall where the refractive index is continuous but its derivative jumps. For this…
A nematic membrane is a sheet with embedded orientational order, which can occur in biological cells, liquid crystal films, manufactured materials, and other soft matter systems. By formulating the free energy of nematic films using tensor…
To clarify the relation of energy shifts to scattering phase shifts in one-body and many-body problems, we examine their relation in a number of different situations. We derive, for a particle in a container of arbitrary shape with a…
We characterise the particlelike kinematics of charge-carrying topological defects in nematic media via a geometric field theory. This differs from the theory of electromagnetism, with which it is often compared, due to the absence of…
Consider a surface, enclosing a fixed volume, described by a free-energy depending only on the local geometry; for example, the Canham-Helfrich energy quadratic in the mean curvature describes a fluid membrane. The stress at any point on…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…