Related papers: Stimuli-responsive twist actuators made from soft …
Our understanding of the elasticity and rheology of disordered materials, such as granular piles, foams, emulsions or dense suspensions relies on improving experimental tools to characterize their behaviour at the particle scale. While 2D…
Soft actuators offer a safe, adaptable approach to tasks like gentle grasping and dexterous manipulation. Creating accurate models to control such systems however is challenging due to the complex physics of deformable materials. Accurate…
We use dedicated microfluidic devices to expose soft hydrogel particles to a rapid change in the externally applied osmotic pressure and observe a non-monotonic response: After an initial rapid compression the particle slowly reswells to…
Using video-microscopy imaging we demonstrate the existence of a short-ranged equilibrium attraction between heavy silica colloids diffusing on soft surfaces of cross-linked polymer gels. The inter-colloid potential can be tuned by changing…
Soft composite solids are made of inclusions dispersed within soft matrices. They are ubiquitous in nature and form the basis of many biological tissues. In the field of materials science, synthetic soft composites are promising candidates…
We propose and verify experimentally a new concept for achieving strong nonlinear coupling between the electromagnetic and elastic properties in metamaterials. This coupling is provided through a novel degree of freedom in metamaterial…
Magnetic soft robots embedded with hard magnetic particles enable untethered actuation via external magnetic fields, offering remote, rapid, and precise control, which is highly promising for biomedical applications. However, designing such…
This paper focuses on the homogenization of high-contrast dielectric elastomer composites, materials that deform in response to electrical stimulation. The considered heterogeneous material consisting of an ambient material with inserted…
Recent years have seen a large increase in the number of reported framework materials, including the nowadays-ubiquitous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Many of these materials show flexibility and stimuli-responsiveness, i.e. their…
A remarkable orbital quadrupole magnetic resonance, so-called twist mode, is predicted in alkali metal clusters where it is represented by $I^{\pi}=2^-$ low-energy excitations of valence electrons with strong M2 transitions to the ground…
We investigate electromechanical properties of two-dimensional MoS$_2$ monolayers in the 1H, 1T, and 1T$^\prime$ structures as a function of charge doping by using density functional theory. We find isotropic elastic moduli in the 1H and 1T…
Embedding rigid inclusions into elastic matrix materials is a procedure of high practical relevance, for instance for the fabrication of elastic composite materials. We theoretically analyze the following situation. Rigid spherical…
A magnetic skyrmion is a spin whirl with topological protection and high mobility to electric current. Intrinsic magnetoelastic coupling in chiral magnets permits manipulation of magnetic skyrmions and their lattice using mechanical loads,…
Thermoresponsive microgels are soft colloids that find widespread use as model systems for soft matter physics. Their complex internal architecture, made of a disordered and heterogeneous polymer network, has been so far a major challenge…
Experimental advances in the fabrication and characterization of few-layer materials stacked at a relative twist of small angle have recently shown the emergence of flat energy bands. As a consequence electron interactions become relevant,…
We study the mechanics of a reversible decohesion (unzipping) of an elastic layer subjected to quasi-static end-point loading. At the micro level the system is simulated by an elastic chain of particles interacting with a rigid foundation…
Large deformations of soft elastic beads spinning at high angular velocity in a denser background fluid are investigated theoretically, numerically, and experimentally using millimeter-size polyacrylamide hydrogel particles introduced in a…
Shape-programmable soft materials that exhibit integrated multifunctional shape manipulations, including reprogrammable, untethered, fast, and reversible shape transformation and locking, are highly desirable for a plethora of applications,…
Electrostatic actuators are simple but important switching devices for MEMS applications. Due to the difficulties associated with the electrostatic nonlinearity, precise mathematical description is often hard to obtain for the dynamics of…
We show from experiments and simulations on vibration-activated granular matter that self-propelled polar rods in an elastic medium on a substrate turn and move towards each other. We account for this effective attraction through a…