Related papers: Floppy hydrated salt microcrystals
In the recent years, much attention has been devoted to the inhomogeneous nature of the mechanical response at the nano-scale in disordered solids. Clearly, the elastic heterogeneities that have been characterized in this context are…
We present evidence that the prismatic and secondary prism facets of ice-I$_\mathrm{h}$ crystals possess structural features that can reduce the effective hydrophilicity of the ice/water interface. The spreading dynamics of liquid water…
The lack of detailed balance in active colloidal suspensions allows dissipation to determine stationary states. Here we show that slow viscous flow produced by polar or apolar active colloids near plane walls mediates attractive…
We report on the differences between colloidal systems left to evolve in the earth's gravitational field and the same systems for which a slow continuous rotation averaged out the effects of particle sedimentation on a distance scale small…
We present a study of patterns, formed in drying drops of aqueous gelatin solution containing sodium sulphate. The patterns are highly complex, consisting of a hierarchical sequence of rings which form concentric bands as well as dendritic…
Frustrated systems exhibit remarkable properties due to the high degeneracy of their ground states. Stabilised by competing interactions, a rich diversity of typically nanometre-sized phase structures appear in polymer and colloidal…
Diamondoids are promising materials for applications in catalysis and nanotechnology. Since many of their applications are in aqueous environments, to understand their function it is essential to know the structure and dynamics of the water…
Spherulites are complex polycrystalline structures that form through the self-assembly of small aggregated nanocrystals starting from a central point and growing radially outward. Despite their wide prevalence and relevance to fields…
Self-assembly is one of the crucial mechanisms allowing to design multifunctional materials. Soft hybrid materials contain components of different nature and exhibit competitive interactions which drive self-organisation into structures of…
The striking anomalies in physical properties of supercooled water that were discovered in the 1960-70s, remain incompletely understood and so provide both a source of controversy amongst theoreticians, and a stimulus to experimentalists…
There is a deep analogy between the physics of crystalline solids and the behavior of superfluids, dating back to pioneering work of Phillip Anderson, Paul Martin and others. The stiffness to shear deformations in a periodic crystal…
Spontaneous emergence of organized states in materials driven by non-equilibrium conditions is of significant fundamental and technological interest. In many cases, the organized states are complex, hence, with some well-studied exceptions,…
The physical gelation of colloids produces elastic structures that are commonly used to stabilize complex fluids in multiple industries. However, the ability to control the level of elastic modulus of these materials is limited by the…
We use large-scale simulations to investigate the dynamic fracture of silica and sodium-silicate glasses under uniaxial tension. The stress-strain curves demonstrate that silica glass is brittle whereas the glasses rich in Na show…
We perform kinetic Monte Carlo simulations of a distinguishable-particle lattice model of structural glasses with random particle interactions. By varying the interaction distribution and the average particle hopping energy barrier, we…
Achieving a coherent understanding of the many thermodynamic and dynamic anomalies of water is among the most important unsolved puzzles in physics, chemistry, and biology. One hypothesized explanation imagines the existence of a line of…
The molecular structures of amorphous silica and crystalline quartz are used to predict their intrinsic strength and fracture toughness together with the theoretical strength of silicon dioxide. At the atomic scale, the amorphous silica is…
The interplay between order and geometry in soft condensed matter systems is an active field with many striking results and even more open problems. Ordered structures on curved surfaces appear in multi-electron helium bubbles, viral and…
Jamming is a fundamental transition that governs the mechanical behavior of particulate media, including sand, foam and dense suspensions but also biological tissues: Upon compression, particulate media can change from freely flowing to a…
A definition of structural diversity, adapted from the biodiversity literature, is introduced to provide a general characterization of structures of condensed matter. Using the Favored Local Structure (FLS) lattice model as a testbed, the…