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Stressed soft materials commonly present viscoelastic signatures in the form of power-law or exponential decay. Understanding the origins of such rheologic behaviors is crucial to find proper technological applications. Using an elastic…
Molecular chirality leads to a wonderful variety of equilibrium structures, from the simple cholesteric phase to the twist-grain-boundary phases, and it is responsible for interesting and technologically important materials like…
The diffusion of molecules (penetrants) of variable size, shape, and chemistry through dense crosslinked polymer networks is a fundamental scientific problem that is broadly relevant in materials, polymer, physical and biological chemistry.…
Lipid membranes, the barrier defining living cells and many of their sub-compartments, bind to a wide variety of nano- and micro-meter sized objects. In the presence of strong adhesive forces, membranes can strongly deform and wrap the…
Quantifying the relationship between geometric descriptors of microstructure and effective properties like permeability is essential for understanding and improving the behavior of porous materials. In this paper, we employ a previously…
Mixing at the microfluidic scale is challenging due to the low Reynolds numbers and often high P\'eclet numbers. Without turbulence, mixing relies solely on diffusion, resulting in slow and inefficient mixing. We demonstrate enhanced mixing…
Biomolecular condensates formed through the phase separation of proteins and nucleic acids are widely observed, offering a fundamental means of organizing intracellular materials in a membrane-less fashion. Traditionally, these condensates…
This study explores the role that the microstructure plays in determining the macroscopic static response of porous elastic continua and exposes the occurrence of position-dependent nonlocal effects that are strictly correlated to the…
The connection between fundamental interactions acting in molecules in a fluid and macroscopically measured properties, such as the viscosity between colloidal particles coated with polymers, is studied here. The role that hydrodynamic and…
In this thesis the formation and properties of a polymer gel on and at a surface are investigated. The gel under investigation is defined as a three-dimensional network of "phantom" macromolecules that form permanent links with one another…
Cohesive granular materials such as wet sand, snow, and powders can flow like a viscous liquid. However, the elementary mechanisms of momentum transport in such athermal particulate fluids are elusive. As a result, existing models for…
The macroscopic mechanical properties of densely packed coagulated colloidal particle gels strongly depend on the local arrangement of the powder particles on length scales of a few particle diameters. Heterogeneous microstructures exhibit…
Mapping conformational heterogeneity of macromolecules presents a formidable challenge to X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, which often presume its absence. This has severely limited our knowledge of the conformations…
The hydrodynamic effects of macromolecular crowding inside cells is often studied in vitro by using polymers as crowding reagents. Confinement of polymers inside cell-sized droplets has been shown to affect the diffusion of small molecules.…
The structural characterization of microgels at interfaces is fundamental to understand both their 2D phase behavior and their role as stabilizers that enable emulsions to be broken on demand. However, this characterization is usually…
Bulk rheological properties of viscoelastic fluids have been extensively studied in macroscopic shearing geometries. However, little is known when an active microscopic probe is used to locally perturb them far from the linear-response…
Solutions of macromolecules can undergo liquid-liquid phase separation to form droplets with ultra-low surface tension. Droplets with such low surface tension wet and spread over common surfaces such as test tubes and microscope slides,…
We employ small-angle X-ray and dynamic light scattering to investigate the microscopic structure and dynamics of dense suspensions of ultra-low crosslinked (ULC) poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) microgels. By probing the supercooled…
Ultrasound-induced degradation of soft polymeric colloids, like microgels, as well as a controlled drug release enabled by mechanoresponsive bonds, has recently attracted considerable attention. However, most examples in the literature…
Fluid membranes made out of lipid bilayers are the fundamental separation structure in eukaryotic cells. Many physiological processes rely on dramatic shape and topological changes (e.g. fusion, fission) of fluid membrane systems. Fluidity…