Related papers: Corners in soft solids behave as defects in crysta…
Amorphous solids tend to present an abundance of soft elastic modes, which diminish their transport properties, generate heterogeneities in their elastic response, and affect non-linear processes like thermal activation of plasticity. This…
The elastic Leidenfrost effect occurs when a vaporizable soft solid is lowered onto a hot surface. Evaporative flow couples to elastic deformation, giving spontaneous bouncing or steady-state floating. The effect embodies an unexplored…
We study, from first principles, the pressure exerted by an active fluid of spherical particles on general boundaries in two dimensions. We show that, despite the non-uniform pressure along curved walls, an equation of state is recovered…
We study the phase behavior of a classical system of particles interacting through a strictly convex soft-repulsive potential which, at variance with the pairwise softened repulsions considered so far in the literature, lacks a region of…
The Willmore energy plays a central role in the conformal geometry of surfaces in the conformal 3-sphere \(S^3\). It also arises as the leading term in variational problems ranging from black holes, to elasticity, and cell biology. In the…
The isoscalar and isovector particle densities and the surface tension coefficients at the average binding energy are used to derive analytical expressions of the neutron skin thickness and the isovector stiffness of sharp edged…
We investigate equilibrium configurations for surface energies which contain the squared $L^2$ norm of the difference of the mean curvature H and the spontaneous curvature $c_o$ coupled with the elastic energy of the boundary curve, which…
Large deformations of soft elastic beads spinning at high angular velocity in a denser background fluid are investigated theoretically, numerically, and experimentally using millimeter-size polyacrylamide hydrogel particles introduced in a…
Energy dissipation in sheared dry and wet granulates is considered in the presence of an externally applied confining pressure. Discrete element simulations reveal that for sufficiently small confining pressures, the energy dissipation is…
Soft matters whose constituents are deformable are ubiquitous in nature especially in biological systems-including cells and their organelles-as well as in foams and emulsions. The capacity for deformation in these soft materials gives rise…
A nonrelativistic quantum mechanical particle moving freely on a curved surface feels the effect of the nontrivial geometry of the surface through the kinetic part of the Hamiltonian, which is proportional to the Laplace-Beltrami operator,…
In these Lecture Notes we aim at clarifying how soft matter physics, and herein notably statistical mechanics and fluid mechanics, can be engaged to understand and manipulate non-equilibrium systems consisting of numerous (microscopic)…
In this thesis, a four dimensional conformally invariant energy is studied. This energy generalises the well known two-dimensional Willmore energy. Although not positive definite, it includes minimal hypersurfaces as critical points. We…
Soft materials including elastomers and gels are pervasive in biological systems and technological applications. Whereas it is known that intrinsic fracture energies of soft materials are relatively low, how the intrinsic fracture energy…
The significance of wettability between solid and liquid substances in different fields encourages scientists to develop accurate models to estimate the resultant apparent contact angles. Surface free energy (SFE), which is principally…
Crystallography typically studies collections of point particles whose interaction forces are the gradient of a potential. Lifting this assumption generically gives rise in the continuum limit to a form of elasticity with additional moduli…
Understanding the contact between solid surfaces is a long standing problem which has a strong impact on the physics of many processes such as adhesion, friction, lubrication and wear. Experimentally, the investigation of solid/solid…
Near-equilibrium bottom-up crystallization of fully-ionized neutron star crusts or white dwarf cores is considered. We argue that this process is similar to liquid-phase epitaxial (i.e. preserving order of previous layers) crystal growth or…
We investigate the formation of cluster crystals with multiply occupied lattice sites on a spherical surface in systems of ultra-soft particles interacting via repulsive, bounded pair potentials. Not all interactions of this kind lead to…
For the contact of two finite portions of interacting rigid crystalline surfaces, we compute the dependence of the pinning energy barrier on the misfit angle and contact area. The resulting data are used to investigate the distribution of…