Related papers: Smectite phase separation is driven by emergent in…

The charging and dissolution of mineral surfaces in contact with flowing liquids are ubiquitous in nature, as most minerals in water spontaneously acquire charge and dissolve. Mineral dissolution has been studied extensively under…

A recent surge of discoveries has sparked significant interest in active systems where a particle moves autonomously in resonance with its self-generated wave field, leading to notable wave-mediated effects including new propulsion…

Ciliary oscillations driven by molecular motors cause fluid motion at micron scale. Stable oscillations require a substantial source of dissipation to balance the energy input of motors. Conventionally, it stems from external fluid. We…

Non-bonded interactions govern structure, stability, and function across a wide range of solid-state materials, yet their chemical origins are often difficult to resolve from total energies alone. Here we generalize absolutely localized…

Phase separation into compositionally and physically distinct domains is ubiquitous in (non)living matter ranging from alloys and emulsions to biomolecular condensates in cells. The organization of these domains can be controlled, for…

Colloids dispersed in nematic liquid crystals form topological composites in which colloid-associated defects mediate interactions while adhering to fundamental topological constraints. Better realising the promise of such materials…

Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…

We study phase-separating fluid mixtures as they demix in the presence of chemical reactions that maintain them away from thermodynamic equilibrium. We show that in such chemically active emulsions the interplay of chemical reactions, phase…

Moving contact lines of more than two phases dictate a large number of interfacial phenomena. Despite its significance to fundamental and applied processes, the contact lines at a junction of four-phases (two immiscible liquids, solid and…

The statistical mechanics of equilibrium interfaces has been well-established for over a half century. In the last decade, a wealth of observations have made increasingly clear that a new perspective is required to describe interfaces…

During the past sixty minutes only, oil companies have extracted six trillions liters of oil from the ground, i.e. the volume of about two hundreds Olympic swimming pools. This phenomenal number gives a striking illustration of the impact…

We identify and characterize a new class of fingering instabilities in liquid metals; these instabilities are unexpected due to the large interfacial tension of metals. Electrochemical oxidation lowers the effective interfacial tension of a…

Depletion interactions between colloidal particles dispersed in a fluid medium are effective interactions induced by the presence of other types of colloid. They are not instantaneous but build up in time. We show by means Brownian dynamics…

The surface free energy is one of the most fundamental properties of solids, hence, manipulating the surface energy and thereby the wetting properties of solids, has tremendous potential for various physical, chemical, biological as well as…

Electronic-liquid-crystal phases, in which part of the spatial symmetries are broken spontaneously, are considered to play a vital role in interpreting the structure-property relation in strongly-correlated materials. Although…

Spontaneous symmetry breaking occurs in various equilibrium and nonequilibrium systems, where phase transitions are typically marked by a single critical point that separates ordered and disordered regimes. We reveal a novel phenomenon in…

The formation of ice affects many aspects of our everyday life as well as technologies such as cryotherapy and cryopreservation. Foreign substances almost always aid water freezing through heterogeneous ice nucleation, but the molecular…

Smectic liquid crystals are charcterized by layers that have a preferred uniform spacing and vanishing curvature in their ground state. Dislocations in the smectics play an important role in phase nucleation, layer reorientation, and…

Using molecular dynamics simulations and methods of importance sampling, we study the thermodynamics and dynamics of sodium chloride in the aqueous premelting layer formed spontaneously at the interface between ice and its vapor. We uncover…

Using simulations of hard rods in smectic-A states, we find non-gaussian diffusion and heterogeneous dynamics due to the equilibrium periodic smectic density profiles, which give rise to permanent barriers for layer-to-layer diffusion. This…