Related papers: Elastocaloric effect in amorphous polymer networks…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
We develop a mesoscopic model to study the plastic behavior of an amorphous material under cyclic loading. The model is depinning-like and driven by a disordered thresholds dynamics which are coupled by long-range elastic interactions. We…
Experimental and modeling/simulation studies of phase equilibrium and growth morphologies of novel polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) mixtures of PS (polystyrene) and liquid crystals that exhibit a direct isotropic/smectic-A (lamellar)…
The elastocaloric effect (ECE) is a thermodynamic quantity relating changes in entropy to changes in strain experienced by a material. As such, ECE measurements can provide valuable information about the entropy landscape proximate to…
Liquid crystal elastomers are cross-linked polymer networks covalently bonded with liquid crystal mesogens. In the nematic phase, due to strong coupling between mechanical strain and orientational order, these materials display…
We report on strong pretransitional effects across the isotropic liquid-plastic crystal melting temperature in linear and nonlinear dielectric response. Studies were carried out for cyclooctanol (C8H16O) in the unprecedented range of…
Elastocaloric cooling has been identified as a promising alternative to high global warming potential vapor compression cooling. Two key bottlenecks to adoption are the need for bulky/expensive actuators to provide sufficient uniaxial…
The barocaloric effect is still an incipient scientific topic, but it has been attracting an increasing attention in the last years due to the promising perspectives for its application in alternative cooling devices. Here, we present giant…
Predicting solid-solid phase transitions remains a long-standing challenge in materials science. Solid-solid transformations underpin a wide range of functional properties critical to energy conversion, information storage, and thermal…
Solid-state cooling is an environmentally friendly and highly scalable technology that may solve most of the problems associated with current refrigerant methods. Solid-state cooling consists of applying external fields on caloric…
Semiflexible polymers in concentrated lyotropic solution are studied within a bead-spring model by molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on the emergence of a smectic A phase and its properties. We systematically vary the density of the…
Dendritic growth patterns exhibiting four-fold anisotropy are observed when polyethylene oxide undergoes phase segregation from a solution phase to a solid phase. When this phase transition occurs on a substrate that has patterns of…
In vivo and in vitro systems of cells and extra-cellular matrix (ECM) systems are well known to form ordered patterns of orientationally aligned fibers. Here, we interpret them as active analogs of the (disordered) isotropic to the…
Properties of disordered nematic elastomers and gels are theoretically investigated with emphasis on the roles of non-local elastic interactions and crosslinking conditions. Networks originally crosslinked in the isotropic phase lose their…
The two dimensional electron gas (2DEG) in moderate magnetic fields in ultra-clean AlAs-GaAs heterojunctions exhibits transport anomalies suggestive of a compressible, anisotropic metallic state. Using scaling arguments and Monte Carlo…
Amorphization during severe plastic deformation has been observed in various crystalline materials, yet its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This study introduces a novel phase-field model at the mesoscale, integrating…
The yielding transition that occurs in amorphous solids under athermal quasistatic deformation has been the subject of many theoretical and computational studies. Here, we extend this analysis to include thermal effects at finite shear…
One dramatic feature of network liquids is the emergence at low temperatures and high pressures of polyamorphism, where multiple distinct liquid phases are accessed in a single material. Polyamorphism can arise from the competition between…
It is known by now that amorphous solids at zero temperature do not possess a nonlinear elasticity theory: besides the shear modulus which exists, all the higher order coefficients do not exist in the thermodynamic limit. Here we show that…
We present a simplified molecular model of mesogenic dimers consisting of two identical uniaxial mesogenic cores separated by a fixed-length spacer and allowed to assume only two, statistically equivalent, conformations which are non-planar…