Related papers: Cavitation controls droplet sizes in elastic media

Coherent oscillatory activity can arise spontaneously as a result of increased coupling in a system of excitable and passive cells, each being quiescent in isolation. This can potentially explain the appearance of spontaneous rhythmic…

The growth of several biological tissues is known to be controlled in part by local geometrical features, such as the curvature of the tissue interface. This control leads to changes in tissue shape that in turn can affect the tissue's…

Various materials are made of long thin fibers that are randomly oriented to form a complex network in which drops of wetting liquid tend to accumulate at the nodes. The capillary force exerted by the liquid can bend flexible fibers, which…

The study of interactions between biomimetic membranes and micron-sized particles is crucial for understanding various biological processes. Here, we control microparticle spontaneous engulfment by giant lipid vesicles by tuning particle…

Living cells actively regulate their volume in response to changes in the extra-cellular environment, such as osmolarity and chemo-attractant concentration. While the basic physical mechanisms of volume regulation are understood from the…

This work is devoted to establishing the mechanisms of elastic oscillation influence on nucleation processes in metal melts. The method of physical modeling with low-temperature metallic alloys (Wood and Rose) and transparent organic media…

Capillary forces acting at the surface of a liquid drop can be strong enough to deform small objects and recent studies have provided several examples of elastic instabilities induced by surface tension. We present such an example where a…

The nucleation of cavities in a homogenous polymer under tensile strain is investigated in a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulation. In order to establish a causal relation between local microstructure and the onset of cavitation, a…

Biological cells can actively tune their intracellular architecture according to their overall shape. Here we explore the rheological implication of such coupling in a minimal model of a dense cellular material where each cell exerts an…

Low-energy excitations play a key role in all condensed-matter systems, yet there is limited understanding of their nature in glasses, where they correspond to local rearrangements of groups of particles. Here we introduce an algorithm to…

A central question concerning glass-formation has been what governs the kinetic arrest of the quenched liquid - cooling reduces the thermal energy which molecules need to surmount local potential barriers, while the accompanying volume…

Liquid-liquid phase separation has emerged as a fundamental mechanism underlying intracellular organization, with evidence for it being reported in numerous different systems. However, there is a growing concern regarding the lack of…

Cavitation is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature and bubble dynamics in open spaces have been widely studied, but the effects of the wall on the dynamics of cavitation bubbles in confined spaces are still unclear. Here, the dynamics of…

Molecular dynamics is a powerful tool to investigate the properties of fluid systems. However, a correct interpretation of the results of simulations is required. In particular, some simulations show appearance of large voids in liquids,…

Biomolecules, such as proteins and RNAs, can phase separate in the cytoplasm of cells to form biomolecular condensates. Such condensates are liquid-like droplets that can wet biological surfaces such as membranes. Many molecules that…

Biomolecular condensates form on timescales of seconds in cells upon environmental or compositional changes. Condensate formation is thus argued to act as a mechanism for sensing such changes and quickly initiating downstream processes,…

A recent study has demonstrated that phase separation in binary liquid mixtures is arrested in the presence of elastic networks and can lead to a nearly uniformly-sized distribution of the dilute-phase droplets. At longer timescales, these…

The spontaneous formation of droplets via dewetting of a thin fluid film from a solid substrate allows for materials nanostructuring, under appropriate experimental control. While thermal fluctuations are expected to play a role in this…

Droplet coalescence is ubiquitous in nature and the same time key to various technologies, such as inkjet printing. Here, we report on the coalescence of polymer droplets with different chain lengths coalescing on substrates of different…

In living cells, cycles of formation and dissolution of liquid droplets can mediate biological functions such as DNA repair. However, the minimal physicochemical prerequisite for such droplet oscillations remains elusive. Here, we present a…