Related papers: Non-linear elasticity, yielding and entropy in amo…
Soft materials such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions and liquid crystals are constituted by mesoscopic entities held together by weak forces. Their mechanical moduli are several orders of magnitude lower than those of atomic…
Solid contacts involving soft materials are important in mechanical engineering or biomechanics. Experimentally, such contacts have been shown to shrink significantly under shear, an effect which is usually explained using adhesion models.…
Large deformations play a central role in the shape transformations of slender active and biological structures. A classical example is the eversion of the Volvox embryo, which demonstrates the need for shell theories that can describe…
We propose a method to predict the value of the external strain where a generic amorphous solid will fail by a plastic response (i.e. an irreversible deformation), solely on the basis of measurements of the nonlinear elastic moduli. While…
The concept of mechanical screening is widely applied in solid-state systems. Examples include nucleation of defects in crystalline materials, scars and pleats in curved crystals, wrinkles in strongly confined thin sheets, and…
Though extensively studied, hardness, defined as the resistance of a material to deformation, still remains a challenging issue for a formal theoretical description due to its inherent mechanical complexity. The widely applied Teter's…
We present the linear response theory for an elastic solid composed of active Brownian particles with intrinsic individual chirality, deriving both a normal mode formulation and a continuum elastic formulation. Using this theory, we compute…
The rheological behavior of soft glassy materials basically results from the interplay between shearing forces and an intrinsic slow dynamics. This competition can be described by a microscopic theory, which can be viewed as a…
Active solids consume energy to allow for actuation, shape change, and wave propagation not possible in equilibrium. Whereas active interfaces have been realized across many experimental systems, control of three-dimensional (3D) bulk…
Odd elasticity describes the unusual elastic response of solids whose stress-strain relationship is not compatible with an elastic potential. Here, we present a study of odd elasticity in a driven granular matter system composed of grains…
A system of inelastic hard disks in a thin pipe capped by hot walls is studied with the aim of investigating velocity correlations between particles. Two effects lead to such correlations: inelastic collisions help to build localized…
Shear localization occurs in various instances of material instability in solid mechanics and is typically associated with Hadamard-instability for an underlying model. While Hadamard instability indicates the catastrophic growth of…
Solids are distinguished from fluids by their ability to resist shear. In traditional solids, the resistance to shear is associated with the emergence of broken translational symmetry as exhibited by a non-uniform density pattern, which…
The present thesis deals with some properties of classical and quantum scalar fields in an inhomogeneous and/or time-dependent background, focusing on models where the latter can be described as a curved space-time with an event horizon.…
Amorphous solids increase their stress as a function of an applied strain until a mechanical yield point whereupon the stress cannot increase anymore, afterwards exhibiting a steady state with a constant mean stress. In stress controlled…
The hardness of materials plays an important role in material design. There are numerous experimental methods to measure the hardness of materials, but theoretical prediction of hardness is challenging. By investigating the correlation…
The relaxation of a strongly coupled plasma towards the hydrodynamic regime is studied by analyzing the evolution of local and nonlocal observables in the holographic approach. The system is driven in an initial anisotropic and far-from…
We investigate the linear elastic response of amorphous solids to a shear strain at zero temperature. We find that the response is characterized by at least two distinct shear moduli. The first one, $\mu_{\rm ZFC}$, is associated with the…
Active matter is characterized by its ability to induce motion by self-generated stress. In the case of a solid, such motion can lead to shape transformations. The stress-generating components can be anisotropic endowing the material with…
We derive geometrically linearized theories for incompressible materials from nonlinear elasticity theory in the small displacement regime. Our nonlinear stored energy densities may vary on the same (small) length scale as the typical…