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Curved elastic shells can be fabricated through molding or by harnessing residual stresses. These shells often exhibit snap-through behavior and multistability when loaded. We present a unique way of fabricating curved elastic shells that…
External fields can decidedly alter the free energy landscape of soft materials and can be exploited as a powerful tool for the assembly of targeted nanostructures and colloidal materials. Here, we use computer simulations to demonstrate…
Thin elastic films can spontaneously attach to liquid interfaces, offering a platform for tailoring their physical, chemical, and optical properties. Current understanding of the elastocapillarity of thin films is based primarily on studies…
In our common experience, crumpling a sheet requires external compressive force and leads to a random network of folds. However, thin sheets have been theoretically predicted to spontaneously transition from a flat to a crumpled state…
Soft solids and their surface deformations control the response of many natural and artificial systems. Yet, their underlying properties are vigorously debated, particularly for polymer networks. While molecular-scale theories predict no…
Developing tissues need to pattern themselves in space and time. A prevalent mechanism to achieve this are pulsatile active stresses generated by the actin cytoskeleton. Active gel theory is a powerful tool to model the dynamics of…
Self-regulation of living tissue as an example of self-organization phenomena in hierarchical systems of biological, ecological, and social nature is under consideration. The characteristic feature of these systems is the absence of any…
We develop a self-consistent free-energy framework in which membrane shape and osmotic pressure are determined simultaneously in a finite reservoir by minimizing bending elasticity and solute entropy. Solute conservation makes osmotic…
Glassy polymer melts such as the plastics used in pipes, structural materials, and medical devices are ubiquitous in daily life. They accumulate damage over time due to their use, which limits their functionalities and demands periodic…
Elastic properties and internal states of isotropic sphere packings are studied by numerical simulations. Several numerical protocols to assemble dense configurations are compared. One, which imitates experiments with lubricated contacts,…
Atomically thin sheets, such as graphene, are widely used in nanotechnology. Recently they have also been used in applications including kirigami and self-folding origami, where it becomes important to understand how they respond to…
We study elasticity-driven morphological transitions of soft spherical core shell structures in which the core can be treated as an isotropic elastic continuum and the surface or shell as a tensionless liquid layer, whose elastic response…
Natural organisms can convert environmental stimuli into sensory feedback to regulate their body and realize active adaptivity. However, realizing such a feedback-regulation mechanism in synthetic material systems remains a grand challenge.…
Living systems are chiral on multiple scales, from constituent biopolymers to large scale morphology, and their active mechanics is both driven by chiral components and serves to generate chiral morphologies. We describe the mechanics of…
Using numerical simulations, we characterized the behavior of an elastic membrane immersed in an active fluid. Our findings reveal a nontrivial folding and re-expansion of the membrane that is controlled by the interplay of its resistance…
Living systems are capable of locomotion, reconfiguration, and replication. To perform these tasks, cells spatiotemporally coordinate the interactions of force-generating, "active" molecules that create and manipulate non-equilibrium…
Connecting cell behavior to tissue shape and mechanics is a key challenge in the physics of morphogenesis. Cytoskeletal turnover precludes a fixed reference state, and tensions are actively generated independently of strain; so conventional…
Living organisms are molecular systems with self-sustained dynamics via energy conversion through molecular cooperation, resulting in highly complex macroscopic behaviors. Construction of such autonomous macroscopic dynamics at a molecular…
The wrinkling of thin elastic objects provides a means of generating regular patterning at small scales in applications ranging from photovoltaics to microfluidic devices. Static wrinkle patterns are known to be governed by an energetic…
Unlike macroscopic multistable mechanical systems such as snap bracelets or elastic shells that must be physically manipulated into various conformations, microscopic systems can undergo spontaneous conformation switching between…