Related papers: Elastocaloric effect in amorphous polymer networks…
We explore a novel strategy of patterning nematic elastomers that does not require inscribing the texture directly. It is based on varying the dopant concentration that, beside shifting the phase transition point, affects the nematic…
Liquid crystal materials exhibiting up to three nematic phases are reported. Dielectric response measurements show that while the lower temperature nematic phase has ferroelectric order and the highest temperature nematic phase is apolar,…
The mechanocaloric effect is the temperature change of a material upon application or removal of an external stress. Beyond its fundamental interest, this caloric response represents a promising and ecofriendly alternative to current…
Mechanical deformation of amorphous solids can be described as consisting of an elastic part in which the stress increases linearly with strain, up to a yield point at which the solid either fractures or starts deforming plastically. It is…
Athermal systems across a large range of length scales, ranging from foams and granular bead packings to crumpled metallic sheets, exhibit slow stress relaxation when compressed. Experimentally they show a non-monotonic stress response when…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
We present a unified formulation of a rotationally invariant nonlinear elasticity for a variety of spontaneously anisotropic phases, and use it to study thermal fluctuations in nematic elastomers and spontaneously anisotropic gels. We find…
The mechanical behavior of disordered materials such as dense suspensions, glasses or granular materials depends on their thermal and mechanical past. Here we report the memory behavior of a quenched mesoscopic elasto-plastic (QMEP) model.…
The advent of caloric materials for magnetocaloric, elastocaloric, and electrocaloric cooling is changing the landscape of solid state cooling technologies with potentials for high-efficiency and environmentally-friendly residential and…
Resistivity measurements are widely exploited to uncover electronic excitations and phase transitions in metallic solids. While single crystals are preferably studied to explore crystalline anisotropies, these usually cancel out in…
Motivated by recent experiments, the isotropic-nematic phase transition in chromonic liquid crystals is studied. As temperature decreases, nematic nuclei nucleate, grow, and coalesce, giving rise to tactoid microstructures in an isotropic…
Elastomeric mechanical metamaterials exhibit unconventional behaviour, emerging from their microstructures often deforming in a highly nonlinear and unstable manner. Such microstructural pattern transformations lead to non-local behaviour…
In liquid crystal elastomers, the orientational order of liquid crystals is coupled with elastic distortions of crosslinked polymer networks. Previous theoretical research has described these materials through two different approaches: a…
During the melting transition of dimyristoyl phosphatidylglycerol (DMPG), the order of the lipid chains and the three-dimensional, vesicular structural arrangement change simultaneously. These changes result in peculiar heat capacity…
The development of neuromorphic systems based on memristive elements - resistors with memory - requires a fundamental understanding of their collective dynamics when organized in networks. Here, we study an experimentally inspired model of…
An assumption in micromechanical analysis of polymers is that the constitutive polymeric media is non-porous. Non-porosity of media, however, is merely a simplifying assumption. In this paper, we neglect this assumption and studied polymer…
The phase behavior of ionic fluids on simple cubic and tetragonal (anisotropic) lattices has been studied by grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations. Systems with both the true lattice Coulombic potential and continuous-space $1/r$…
We investigate the crystallization of crosslinked and entangled polymers under external deformation using a coarse-grained poly(vinyl alcohol) (CG-PVA) model and molecular dynamics simulations. Following uniaxial deformation, the systems…
Using dynamic light scattering, we measure for the first time the temperature-dependent elastic moduli and associated orientational viscosity coefficients of the nematic phase in a self-assembled lyotropic chromonic liquid crystal. The bend…
We study the elasticity of cross-linked networks of thermally fluctuating stiff polymers. As compared to their purely mechanical counterparts, it is shown that these thermal networks have a qualitatively different elastic response. By…