Related papers: Universal deformations of ideal liquid crystal ela…
Materials that can be deformed by thermal stresses at room temperature are called soft materials. Colloidal suspensions comprising solid particles evenly distributed in a fluid phase (smoke, fog, ink and milk, for example),…
The Leidenfrost effect occurs when an object near a hot surface vaporizes rapidly enough to lift itself up and hover. Although well-understood for liquids and stiff sublimable solids, nothing is known about the effect with materials whose…
We present a new finite deformation, dynamic finite element model that incorporates surface tension to capture elastocapillary effects on the electromechanical deformation of dielectric elastomers. We demonstrate the significant effect that…
Liquid foams have been observed to behave like immersed granular materials in at least one respect: deformation tends to raise their liquid contents, a phenomenon called dilatancy. We present a geometrical interpretation thereof in foams…
Dislocation nucleation in homogeneous crystals initially unfolds as a linear symmetry-breaking elastic instability. In the absence of explicit nucleation centers, such instability develops simultaneously all over the crystal and due to the…
The blue phases are observed in highly chiral liquid crystalline compositions that nascently organize into a three-dimensional, crystalline nanostructure. The periodicity of the unit cell lattice parameters is on the order of the wavelength…
Smart surfaces that reversibly change the interfacial friction coefficients in response to external stimuli enable a wide range of applications, such as grips, seals, brake pads, packaging films, and fabrics. Here a new concept of such a…
Elastomers are viscoelastic materials and their properties significantly depend on the loading rate. The actual stress experienced by these materials is the sum of equilibrium and dissipative (inelastic) terms. At very low loading rates we…
Thermo-elasticity couples the deformation of an elastic (solid) body to its temperature and vice-versa. It is a solid-like property. Highlighting such property in liquids is a paradigm shift: it requires long-range collective interactions…
By analyzing elastic theory for nematic liquid crystals, we distinguish three regimes of elastic constants. In one regime, the Ericksen inequalities are satisfied, and the ground state of the director field is uniform. In a second regime,…
Calculating by analytical theory the deformation of finite-sized elastic bodies in response to internally applied forces is a challenge. Here, we derive explicit analytical expressions for the amplitudes of modes of surface deformation of a…
Liquid crystalline elastomers (LCEs) are shape-changing materials that exhibit large deformations in response to applied stimuli. Local control of the orientation of LCEs spatially directs the deformation of these materials to realize…
We discuss the nonlinear elastic response in scale invariant solids. Following previous work, we split the analysis into two basic options: according to whether scale invariance (SI) is a manifest or a spontaneously broken symmetry. In the…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
The effective macroscopic response of nonlinear elastomeric inhomogeneous materials is of great interest in many applications including nonlinear composite materials and soft biological tissues. The interest of the present work is…
Finite plasticity theories are still a subject of controversy and lively discussions. Among the approaches to finite elastoplasticity two became especially popular. The first, implemented in the commercial finite element codes, is based on…
We show that the vibrational response of a glassy liquid at finite frequencies can be described by continuum mechanics despite the vast degeneracy of the vibrational ground state; standard continuum elasticity assumes a unique ground state.…
The modes of attachments, detachments and relaxations of molecules of rubbers and gels on solid surfaces are keys to understanding their frictional properties. An early stochastic model of polymer relaxations on surfaces was given by…
We investigate theoretically the collective dynamics of soft active particles living in a viscous fluid. We focus on a minimal model for active but non-motile particles consisting of $N>1$ elastic dimers deformed by active stresses and…
We propose a dynamical theory of low-temperature shear deformation in amorphous solids. Our analysis is based on molecular-dynamics simulations of a two-dimensional, two-component noncrystalline system. These numerical simulations reveal…