Related papers: Short and soft: multi-domain organization, tunable…
We report on the critical properties of minimaly-polydisperse crystals, hexagonal in 2d and face-centered cubic in 3 dimensions, at the isostatic jamming point. The force and gap distributions display power-law tails for small values. The…
Many soft-matter and biophysical systems are composed of monomers which reversibly assemble into rod-like aggregates. The aggregates can then order into liquid-crystal phases if the density is high enough, and liquid-crystal ordering…
Using x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy, we studied the dynamics in the nematic phase of a nanorodsuspension. The collective diffusion coefficient in the plane perpendicular to the director varies sharply with the wave vector. Combining…
Randomly disordered (polydomain) liquid crystalline elastomers align under stress. We study the dynamics of stress relaxation before, during and after the Polydomain-Monodomain transition. The results for different materials show the…
Periodic configurations have dominated the design of phononic and elastic-acoustic metamaterial structures for the past decades. Unlike periodic crystals, quasicrystals lack translational symmetry but are unrestricted in rotational…
The relation between dynamics and structure in systems of Brownian bidisperse 2D hard disks with arrested dynamics is examined using numerical simulations. Surprisingly, the suspensions show dynamic arrest at an area fraction of {\phi}…
We find that the hierarchical organization of the potential energy landscape in a model supercooled liquid can be related to a change in the spatial distribution of soft normal modes. For groups of nearby minima, between which fast…
The dynamics of soft colloids in solutions is characterized by internal collective motion as well as center-of-mass diffusion. Using neutron scattering we demonstrate that the competition between the relaxation processes associated with…
The slow dynamics for a colloidal suspension of particles interacting with a hard-core repulsion complemented by a short-ranged attraction is discussed within the frame of mode-coupling theory for ideal glass transitions for parameter…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
We introduce structural heterogeneity, a new topological characteristic for semi-ordered materials that captures their degree of organisation at a mesoscopic level and tracks their time-evolution, ultimately detecting the order-disorder…
We study the low-frequency, long-wavelength dynamics of soft and semi-soft nematic elastomers using two different but related dynamic theories. Our first formulation describes the pure hydrodynamic behavior of nematic elastomers in which…
By means of extensive simulations, we investigate concentrated solutions of globular single-chain nanoparticles (SCNPs), an emergent class of synthetic soft nano-objects. By increasing the concentration, the SCNPs show a reentrant behaviour…
Charged colloidal crystals exhibit a subtle interplay between electrostatic screening and elastic deformation. In an anisotropic elastic medium the coupling between dilation and the local ionic environment becomes direction dependent,…
We perform a combined experimental and theoretical investigation of the orientational dynamics of rod-like colloidal particles in dilute suspension as they are subjected to a time-dependent homogeneous planar elongational flow. Our…
We introduce a phenomenological theory for a new class of soft active fluids, with the ability to synchronise. Our theoretical framework describes the macroscopic behaviour of a collection of interacting anisotropic elements with cyclic…
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…
Assemblies of purely repulsive and frictionless particles, such as emulsions or hard spheres, display very curious properties near their jamming transition, which occurs at the random close packing for mono-disperse spheres. Although such…
We report on the linear viscoelastic properties of mixtures comprising multiarm star (as model soft colloids) and long linear chain homopolymers in a good solvent. In contrast to earlier works, we investigated symmetric mixtures (with a…
Anisotropic fluids appear in a diverse array of systems, from liquid-crystal displays to bacterial swarms, and are characterized by orientational order. Large colloidal particles immersed in such environments disturb the medium's…