Related papers: Active elastocapillarity in soft solids with negat…
The complicated dynamics of the contact line of a moving droplet on a solid substrate often hamper the efficient modeling of microfluidic systems. In particular, the selection of the effective boundary conditions, specifying the contact…
Cutting-edge smart materials are transforming the domains of soft robotics, actuators, and sensors by harnessing diverse non-mechanical stimuli, such as electric and magnetic fields. Accurately modelling their physical behaviour…
Grasping, in both biological and engineered mechanisms, can be highly sensitive to the gripper and object morphology, as well as perception, and motion planning. Here we circumvent the need for feedback or precise planning by using an array…
Soft solids exhibit instability and develop surface undulations due to surface effects, a phenomenon known as the elastic Plateau-Rayleigh (PR) instability, driven by the interplay of surface and bulk elasticity. Previous studies on the PR…
When two chemically passivated solids are brought into contact, interfacial interactions between the solids compete with intrabulk elastic forces. The relative importance of these interactions, which are length-scale dependent, will be…
To study the impact of active systems on their surroundings, we introduce a model that couples an active nematic fluid to an isotropic substrate fluid via friction. We numerically show that as the active layer develops turbulence, the…
We theoretically explore fluidization of epithelial tissues by active T1 neighbor exchanges. We show that the geometry of cell-cell junctions encodes important information about the local features of the energy landscape, which we support…
It is frequent for active or living entities to find themselves embedded in a surrounding medium. Resulting composite systems are usually classified as either active fluids or active solids. Yet, in reality, particularly in the biological…
Active materials are those in which individual, uncoordinated local stresses drive the material out of equilibrium on a global scale. Examples of such assemblies can be seen across scales from schools of fish to the cellular cytoskeleton…
Modeling membrane interactions with arbitrarily shaped colloidal particles, such as environmental micro- and nanoplastics, at the cell scale remains particularly challenging, owing to the complexity of particle geometries and the need to…
We analyze experimentally the shape of a long elastic filament rotating in a viscous liquid. We identify a continuous but sharp transition from a straight to an helical shape, resulting from the competition between viscous stresses and…
Recent studies have highlighted the sensitivity of active matter to boundaries and their geometries. Here we develop a general theory for the dynamics and statistics of active particles on curved surfaces and illustrate it on two examples.…
Drops of active liquid crystal have recently shown the ability to self-propel, which was associated with topological defects in the orientation of active filaments [Sanchez {\em et al.}, Nature {\bf 491}, 431 (2013)]. Here, we study the…
In the dilute limit Eshelby's inclusion theory captures the behavior of a wide range of systems and properties. However, because Eshelby's approach neglects interfacial stress, it breaks down in soft materials as the inclusion size…
Nanoscale molecular transport plays a crucial role in regulating mass diffusion and responsiveness in condensed matter systems. In soft porous crystals, in particular, adsorption of guest molecules induces host framework deformation and…
Surface stresses have recently emerged as a key player in the mechanics of highly compliant solids. The classic theories of contact mechanics describe adhesion with a compliant substrate as a competition between surface energies driving…
In recent work, it was shown that elasticity theory can break down in amorphous solids subjected to nonuniform {\em static} loads. The elastic fields are screened by geometric dipoles; these stem from gradients of the quadrupole field…
Hard models for particle interactions have played a crucial role in the understanding of the structure of condensed matter. In particular, they help to explain the formation of oriented phases in liquids made of anisotropic molecules or…
Energy dynamics calculations in a 3D fluid simulation of drift wave turbulence in the linear Large Plasma Device (LAPD) [W. Gekelman et al., Rev. Sci. Inst. 62, 2875 (1991)] illuminate processes that drive and dissipate the turbulence.…
Few equilibrium --even less so nonequilibrium-- statistical-mechanical models with continuous degrees of freedom can be solved exactly. Classical hard-spheres in infinitely many space dimensions are a notable exception. We show that even…