Related papers: Instabilities in liquid crystal elastomers
The intermittent transition between slow growth and rapid shrinkage in polymeric assemblies is termed dynamic instability, a feature observed in a variety of biochemically distinct assemblies including microtubules, actin and their…
A long cylindrical cavity through a soft solid forms a soft microfluidic channel, or models a vascular capillary. We observe experimentally that, when such a channel bears a pressurized fluid, it first dilates homogeneously, but then…
We analyze the fluctuations in particle positions and inter-particle forces in disordered jammed crystals in the limit of weak disorder. We demonstrate that such athermal systems are fundamentally different from their thermal counterparts,…
Nematic liquid crystals confined to geometrically as well as chemically patterned substrate on one end and a flat substrate with strong anchoring on the other is studied using non-Boltzmann Monte Carlo methods. We observe significant…
The stretching of a polymer chain by a large scale chaotic flow is considered. The steady state which emerges as a balance of the turbulent stretching and anharmonic resistance of the chain is quantitatively described, i.e. the dependency…
Spatial heterogeneity in the elastic properties of soft random solids is investigated via a two-pronged approach. First, a nonlocal phenomenological model for the elastic free energy is examined. This features a quenched random kernel,…
The deformation and flow of disordered solids, such as metallic glasses and concentrated emulsions, involves swift localized rearrangements of particles that induce a long-range deformation field. To describe these heterogeneous processes,…
By comparing the response to external strains in metallic glasses and in Lenard-Jones glasses we find a quantitative universality of the fundamental plastic instabilities in the athermal, quasistatic limit. Microscopically these two types…
Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, colloids, granular materials, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large…
Biological membranes constantly change their shape in response to external stimuli, and understanding the remodeling and stability of vesicles in heterogeneous environments is therefore of fundamental importance for a range of cellular…
A rectangular plate of dielectric elastomer exhibiting gradients of material properties through its thickness will deform inhomogeneously when a potential difference is applied to compliant electrodes on its major surfaces, because each…
Nonlinear normal modes are periodic orbits that survive in nonlinear chains, whose instability plays a crucial role in the dynamics of many-body Hamiltonian systems toward thermalization. Here we focus on how the stability of nonlinear…
Direct numerical simulation of the strongly nonlinear stages of instability development for a non-conducting liquid with a charged free surface in a normal electric field is performed. It is demonstrated that two main stages of the…
We report hybrid lattice Boltzmann (HLB) simulations of the hydrodynamics of an active nematic liquid crystal sandwiched between confining walls with various anchoring conditions. We confirm the existence of a transition between a passive…
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…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
Liquid crystal elastomers represent a novel class of programmable shape-transforming materials whose shape change trajectory is encoded in the material's nematic director field. Using three-dimensional nonlinear finite element…
Disordered solids exhibit unusual properties of their vibrational states and thermal conductivities. Recent progresses have well established the concept of "elastic heterogeneity", i.e., disordered materials show spatially inhomogeneous…
Thanks to their unique properties, nematic liquid crystals feature a variety of mechanisms for light-matter interactions. For continuous-wave optical excitations, the two dominant contributions stem from reorientational and thermal…
The sliding columnar phase is a new liquid-crystalline phase of matter composed of two-dimensional smectic lattices stacked one on top of the other. This phase is characterized by strong orientational but weak positional correlations…