Related papers: Length-scales in sheared soft matter depend sensit…
Self-assembly in natural and synthetic molecular systems can create complex aggregates or materials whose properties and functionality rises from their internal structure and molecular arrangement. The key microscopic features that control…
The shear-modulus and yield-stress of amorphous solids are important material parameters, with the former determining the rate of increase of stress under external strain and the latter being the stress value at which the material flows in…
Granular materials often present correlations between particle size and shape due to their geological formation and mechanisms of weathering and fragmentation. It is known that particle shape strongly affects shear strength. However, the…
We probe the onset and effect of contact changes in 2D soft harmonic particle packings which are sheared quasistatically under controlled strain. First, we show that in the majority of cases, the first contact changes correspond to the…
Bidisperse particle systems are common in both natural and engineered materials, and it is known to influence packing, flow, and stability. However, their direct effect on elastic properties, particularly in systems with attractive…
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…
Granular materials show inhomogeneous flows characterized by strain localization. When strain is localized in a sheared granular material, rigid regions of a nearly undeformed state are separated by shear bands, where the material yields…
Amorphous particulate matter constitutes a wide range of natural and synthetic materials. Despite this ubiquity, the way in which these systems' disordered microstructure couples to their often subtle and complex dynamical behavior is not…
It is common in the study of a dizzying array of soft matter systems to perform agent-based simulations of particles interacting via conservative and often short-ranged forces. In this context, well-established algorithms for efficiently…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the occurrence of inhomogeneous shear flows in soft jammed materials. We use rough walls to impose a simple shear flow and study the athermal motion of jammed assemblies of soft…
Shear thickening of particle suspensions is characterized by a transition between lubricated and frictional contacts between the particles. Using 3D numerical simulations, we study how the inter-particle friction coefficient influences the…
In multi-component soft matter, interface properties often play a key role in determining the properties of the overall system. The identification of the internal dynamic structures in non-equilibrium situations requires the interface…
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…
Plastic deformation of heterogeneous solid structures is often characterized by random intermittent local plastic events. On the mesoscale this feature can be represented by a spatially fluctuating local yield threshold. Here we study the…
The dynamic behavior of the slip length in a fluid flow confined between atomically smooth surfaces is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. At weak wall-fluid interactions, the slip length increases nonlinearly with the shear…
The macroscopic properties of materials that we observe and exploit in engineering application result from complex interactions between physics at multiple length and time scales: electronic, atomistic, defects, domains etc. Multiscale…
Many fibrous materials are modeled as elastic networks featuring a substantial separation between the stiffness scales that characterize different microscopic deformation modes of the network's constituents. This scale separation has been…
Dense suspensions of fine particles are significant in numerous biological, industrial, and natural phenomena. They also provide an ideal tool to develop statistical mechanics description for out-of-equilibrium systems. Predicting the bulk…
Nonequilibrium molecular dynamics simulations are used to study the shear thinning behavior of immiscible symmetric polymer blends. The phase separated polymers are subjected to a simple shear flow imposed by moving a wall parallel to the…
Simple homogeneous shear flows of frictionless, deformable particles are studied by particle simulations at large shear rates and for differently soft, deformable particles. The particle stiffness sets a time-scale that can be used to scale…