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Surface tension-driven flow techniques have recently emerged as an efficient means of shedding light into the rheology of thin polymer films. Motivated by experimental and theoretical approaches in films bearing a varying surface…
Nanoplatelets open up a wide range of possibilities for building materials with novel properties linked to their shape anisotropy. A challenge consists of controlling dynamically the order of positioning and orientation in three dimensions…
Recent experimental observations have suggested that topological defects can facilitate the creation of sharp features in developing embryos. Whereas these observations echo established knowledge about the interplay between geometry and…
We study the fluid-mediated approach of a deformable axisymmetric object towards a rigid substrate, focusing on how its shape influences contact formation. For low approach velocities and large Stokes numbers, we show that sharper profiles…
Programmable shape-shifting materials can take different physical forms to achieve multifunctionality in a dynamic and controllable manner. Although morphing a shape from 2D to 3D via programmed inhomogeneous local deformations has been…
Controlling the spatial distribution of liquid droplets on surfaces via surface energy patterning can be used to control material delivery to specified regions via selective liquid/solid wetting. While studies of the equilibrium shape of…
The modification of the wetting properties of marble surfaces upon multi-scale texturing induced by ultrafast laser processing (340 fs pulse duration, 1030 nm wavelength) has been investigated with the aim of evaluating its potential for…
Tunable metasurfaces enable active and on-demand control over optical wavefronts through reconfigurable scattering of resonant nanostructures. Here, we present novel insights inspired by mechanical metamaterials to achieve giant tunability…
The identification and use of reversible Martensitic transformations, typically described as shape memory transformations, as a new class of solid-solid phase change material is experimentally demonstrated here for the first time. To prove…
The thermal properties of coarse grained knotted polymers containing two kinds of monomers $A$ and $B$ fluctuating in a solution are investigated on a simple cubic lattice using the Wang-Landau MC algorithm. These knots have a more complex…
Wetting of micropatterned surfaces is ubiquitous in nature and key to many technological applications like spray cooling, inkjet printing, and semiconductor processing. Overcoming the intrinsic, chemistry- and topography-governed wetting…
While deeply supercooled liquids exhibit divergent viscosity and increasingly heterogeneous dynamics as the temperature drops, their structure shows only seemingly marginal changes. Understanding the nature of relaxation processes in this…
We monitor the transformation of a liquid into an amorphous solid in simulations of a glass forming liquid by measuring the variation of a structural order parameter with either changing temperature or potential energy to establish the…
In the recent years, there has been a growing interest in droplet-based (digital) microfluidics for which, reliable means of droplet manipulation are required. In this study we demonstrate thermal actuation of droplets on liquid platforms,…
Block copolymers often create droplets when placed on a substrate. Such nanostructured droplets can be arranged into regular microstructured arrays, thereby forming hierarchically organized materials that can be used in microelectronics,…
The elementary excitations in metallic glasses (MGs), i.e., $\beta$ processes that involve hopping between nearby sub-basins, underlie many unusual properties of the amorphous alloys. A high-efficacy prediction of the propensity for those…
Many innovative applications require establishing correspondences among 3D geometric objects. However, the countless possible deformations of smooth surfaces make shape matching a challenging task. Finding an embedding to represent the…
The ability to control wettability is important for a wide range of technological applications in which precise microfluidic handling is required. It is known that predesigned roughness at a micro- or nano- scale enhances the wetting…
Quasi-periodic structures of quasicrystals yield novel effects in diverse systems. However, there is little investigation on employing quasi-periodic structures in the morphology control. Here, we show the use of quasi-periodic surface…
In these lectures I discuss long-scale properties of fluctuating polymerized membranes in the presence of network anisotropy and random heterogeneities. Amazingly, even infinitesimal amount of these seemingly innocuous but physically…