Related papers: Floppy hydrated salt microcrystals
Super-cooled liquids are characterized by their fragility: the slowing down of the dynamics under cooling is more sudden and the jump of specific heat at the glass transition is generally larger in fragile liquids than in strong ones.…
The autonomous motion of liquid crystal oil droplets in micellar media arises from spontaneous breaking of time reversal symmetry via nonlinear coupling between Marangoni stresses and surfactant transport. While this phenomenon has been…
Silicon offers great promise as a potential anode active material and the optimum alternative to lithium metal in all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries. However, its practical application is limited by severe volume expansion (~300%) during…
Crystals melt when thermal excitations or the concentration of defects in the lattice is sufficiently high. Upon melting, the crystalline long-range order vanishes, turning the solid to a fluid. In contrast to this classical scenario of…
Freestanding tubular crystals offer a general description of crystalline order on deformable surfaces with cylindrical topology, such as single-walled carbon nanotubes, microtubules, and recently reported colloidal assemblies. These systems…
Hydroxide ion transport and structure in aqueous media is fundamental to many chemical and biological processes. Research on hydroxide behavior has primarily focused on a single fully solvated hydroxide, either as an isolated cluster or in…
The complex physics of self-assembly in colloidal crystals on deformable interfaces and surfaces poses interesting possibilities for the designability and synthesis of next-generation metamaterials. The goal of this article is to…
The existence of nanoscale ductility during the fracture of silicate glasses remains controversial. Here, based on molecular dynamics simulations coupled with topological constraint theory, we show that nano-ductility arises from the…
Soft materials, such as liquids, polymers, foams, gels, colloids, granular materials, and most soft biological materials, play an important role in our daily lives. From a mechanical viewpoint, soft materials can easily achieve large…
Active-elastic instabilities are common phenomena in the natural world which have the aspect of sudden mechanical morphings. Frequently, the driving force of the instability mechanisms has a chemo-mechanical nature which makes these kind of…
We simulate a two-dimensional array of droplets being compressed between two walls. The droplets are adhesive due to an attractive depletion force. As one wall moves toward the other, the droplet array is compressed and eventually induced…
Terrestrial planets are thought to experience episode(s) of large-scale melting early in their history. Fractionation during magma-ocean freezing leads to unstable stratification within the related cumulate layers due to progressive iron…
Active crystals are highly ordered structures that emerge from the self-organization of motile objects, and have been widely studied in synthetic and bacterial active matter. Whether collective crystallization phenomena can occur in groups…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
The peculiar structuring of liquid water stems from a fine-tuned molecular principle embodying the two different interaction demands of the water molecule: The formation of hydrogen bonds or the compensation for coordination defects. Here…
A key goal in developing molecular microrobots that mimic real-world animal dynamic behavior is to understand better the self-continuous progressive motion resulting from collective molecular transformation. This study reports, for the…
A wide range of physical and biological systems, including colloidal magnets, granular spinners, and starfish embryos, are characterized by strongly rotating units that give rise to odd viscosity and odd elasticity. These active systems can…
Density functional theory (DFT) is used to rationalize magnetic parameters of hydrated electron trapped in alkaline glasses as observed using Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) and Electron Spin Echo Envelope Modulation (ESEEM)…
We consider and compare the structural properties of bulk TIP4P water and of a sodium chloride aqueous solution in TIP4P water with concentration c = 0.67 mol/kg, in the metastable supercooled region. In a previous paper [D. Corradini, M.…
At high pressure, the typical behavior of elements dictated by the periodic table - including oxidation numbers, stoichiometries in compounds, and reactivity, to name but a few - is altered dramatically. As pressure is applied, the…