Related papers: Small-misorientation toughness in biominerals evol…
Biominerals formed by animals provide skeletal support, and many other functions. They were previously shown to grow by aggregation of amorphous nanoparticles, but never to grow ion-by-ion from solution, which is a common growth mechanism…
Biomineralizing organisms are widely noted and extensively studied due to their ability to generate structures exhibiting exceptional crystallographic control. Primarily, it is the organisms, such as sea-urchins or bivalves, that generate…
Organic molecular crystals encompass a vast range of materials from pharmaceuticals to organic optoelectronics and proteins to waxes in biological and industrial settings. Crystal defects from grain boundaries to dislocations are known to…
Structural cellular materials in nature, such as wood, trabecular bone, corals, and dentin combine complex biological functions with structural roles, such as skeletal support and impact protection1,2. They feature complex structural…
The growth of crystals confined in porous or cellular materials is ubiquitous in Nature and industry. Confinement affects the formation of biominerals in living organisms, of minerals in the Earth's crust and of salt crystals damaging…
A correlation is established between the macro-scale friction regimes of metals and a transition between two dominant atomistic mechanisms of deformation. Metals tend to exhibit bi-stable friction behavior -- low and converging or high and…
The kinetics of dislocations is studied with computer simulation at loadings of different intensity. It is established that the dislocations have a few different structural states. The dislocations "with the micropore" play important role…
We provide a minimal continuum model for mesoscale plasticity, explaining the cellular dislocation structures observed in deformed crystals. Our dislocation density tensor evolves from random, smooth initial conditions to form self-similar…
Natural hard composites like human bone possess a combination of strength and toughness that exceeds that of their constituents and of many engineered composites. This augmentation is attributed to their complex hierarchical structure,…
Mesocrystals are nanostructured materials consisting of individual nanocrystals having a preferred crystallographic orientation. On mesoscopic length scales, the properties of mesocrystals are strongly affected by structural heterogeneity.…
While biological crystallization processes have been studied on the microscale extensively, models addressing the mesoscale aspects of such phenomena are rare. In this work, we investigate whether the phase-field theory developed in…
To overcome the brittleness limitation of ceramics, various toughening mechanisms have been proposed. Some of the most remarkable, especially for oxides, include the tetragonal-to-monoclinic phase transformation leading to crack shielding…
An increasing variety of crystal structures has been observed in soft condensed matter over the past two decades, surpassing most expectations for the diversity of arrangements accessible through classical driving forces. Here, we survey…
Understanding plastic deformation of crystals in terms of the fundamental physics of dislocations has remained a grand challenge in materials science for decades. To overcome this, the Discrete Dislocation Dynamics (DDD) method has been…
Evolutionary crystal structure prediction proved to be a powerful approach for studying a wide range of materials. Here, we present a specifically designed algorithm for the prediction of the structure of complex crystals consisting of…
We demonstrate that nature has produced a close-packed helical twisted filamentous material in the biomineralization of the mollusc. In liquid crystals, twist-bend nematics have been predicted and observed. We present and analyse evidence…
Intricate biomineralization processes in molluscs engineer hierarchical structures with meso-, nano-, and atomic architectures that give the final composite material exceptional mechanical strength and optical iridescence on the macroscale.…
Silica-carbonate biomorphs are a class of emergent materials, i.e. composite microstructures made of nanometric carbonate crystallites surrounded by amorphous silica. They form via a co-precipitation process in an interplay between alkaline…
Formation of bacterial colonies as biofilm on the surface/interface of various objects has the potential to impact not only human health and disease but also energy and environmental considerations. Biofilms can be regarded as soft…
The development of residual strains within a material is a valuable engineering technique for increasing the material's strength and toughness. Residual strains occur naturally in some biominerals and are an important feature that has…