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Embedding magnetic colloidal particles in an elastic polymer matrix leads to smart soft materials that can reversibly be addressed from outside by external magnetic fields. We discover a pronounced nonlinear superelastic stress-strain…
High-entropy alloys, which exist in the high-dimensional composition space, provide enormous unique opportunities for realizing unprecedented structural and functional properties. A fundamental challenge, however, lies in how to predict the…
Folded protein hydrogels are prime candidates as tuneable biomaterials but it is unclear to what extent their mechanical properties have mesoscopic, as opposed to molecular origins. To address this, we probe hydrogels of the muscle-derived…
A variety of complex fluids consist in soft, round objects (foams, emulsions, assemblies of copolymer micelles or of multilamellar vesicles -- also known as onions). Their dense packing induces a slight deviation from their prefered…
This study proposes and explores a linear hydrodynamic thermo-elasticity system within mixture models, comprising fluid and solid phases, with a focus on biological tissues, particularly tumor-related phenomena. Although tumor growth is not…
Subjected to compressive stresses, soft polymers with stiffness gradients can display various buckling patterns. These compressive stresses can have different origins, like mechanical forces, temperature changes, or, for hydrogel materials,…
Turbulent flows have been used for millennia to mix solutes; a familiar example is stirring cream into coffee. However, many energy, environmental, and industrial processes rely on the mixing of solutes in porous media where confinement…
Long range order and symmetry in heterogeneous materials architected on crystal lattices lead to elastic and inelastic anisotropies and thus limit mechanical functionalities in particular crystallographic directions. Here, we present a…
We define a lattice model for the interaction of a polymer with water. We solve the model in a suitable approximation. In the case of a non-polar homopolymer, for reasonable values of the parameters, the polymer is found in a non-compact…
Soft elastic composite materials containing particulate rigid inclusions in a soft elastic matrix are candidates for developing soft actuators or tunable damping devices. The possibility to reversibly drive the rigid inclusions within such…
In suitable environments, proteins, nucleic acids and certain synthetic polymers fold into unique conformations. This work shows that it is possible to construct lattice models of foldable heteropolymers by expressing the energy only in…
Magnetic programming soft machines has great development prospects in the fields of minimally invasive medicine, wearable device and soft robot. However, unrepeatable magnetization and low modulus limits their applications. So far, there…
We show quantitatively that tiny amounts of copolymer that decorate a oil/water interfaces can greatly enhance the stability of swollen surfactant hexagonal phases, comprising oil tubes regularly arranged in a water matrix. Such soft…
Using experiments and simulations, we study the flow of soft particles through quasi-two-dimensional hoppers. The first experiment uses oil-in-water emulsion droplets in a thin sample chamber. Due to surfactants coating the droplets, they…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles constituted by cross-linked polymer networks with a high potential for applications. In particular, after adsorption at a fluid interface, interfacial tension provides two-dimensional (2D) confinement…
The design of complex materials and the formation of specific patterns often arise from the properties of the individual building blocks. In this respect, colloidal systems offer a unique opportunity because nowadays they can be synthesized…
Thin bilayers made of elastic sheets with different strain recoveries can be used for dynamic shape morphing through ambient stimuli, such as temperature, mass diffusion, and light. As a fundamentally different approach to designing…
Mechanical metamaterials leverage geometric design to achieve unconventional properties, such as high strength at low density, efficient wave guiding, and complex shape morphing. The ability to control shape changes builds on the complex…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles that, when dispersed in a solvent, swell and deswell in response to changes in environmental conditions, such as temperature, concentration, and $p$H. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we model bulk…
Cholesteric liquid crystals can exhibit spatial patterns in molecular alignment at interfaces that can be exploited for particle assembly. These patterns emerge from the competition between bulk and surface energies, tunable with the system…