Related papers: Spreading of foam on a substrate
Motivated by the motion of nematode sperm cells, we present a model for the motion of an adhesive gel on a solid substrate. The gel polymerizes at the leading edge and depolymerizes at the rear. The motion results from a competition between…
Foams are unstable jammed materials. They evolve over timescales comparable to their "time of use", which makes the study of their destabilisation mechanisms crucial for applications. In practice, many foams are made from viscoelastic…
One of the most unique physical features of cell adhesion to external surfaces is the active generation of mechanical force at the cell-material interface. This includes pulling forces generated by contractile polymer bundles and networks,…
Jamming is a common feature of out of equilibrium systems showing slow relaxation dynamics. Here we review our efforts in understanding jamming in granular materials using experiments and computer simulations. We first obtain an estimation…
Droplet impact on oscillating substrates is important for both natural and industrial processes. Recognizing the importance of the dynamics that arise from the interplay between droplet transport and substrate motion, in this work, we…
The paradigmatic model for heterogeneous media used in diffusion studies is built from reflecting obstacles and surfaces. It is well known that the crowding effect produced by these reflecting surfaces slows the dispersion of Brownian…
Studies of the transport of wet water vapour are relevant for various areas of human activity, including the construction and production of building materials, mining, agriculture, environmental safety of technological processes, scientific…
Models that invoke nonlinear wavefront propagation in a chemically excitable medium are rife in the biological literature. Indeed, the idea that wavefront propagation can serve as a signaling mechanism has often been invoked to explain…
Stress patterns in static granular media exhibit unusual features when compared to either liquids or elastic solids. Qualitatively, we attribute these features to the presence of `stress paths', whose geometry depends on the construction…
A new approach to Brownian motion of atomic clusters on solid surfaces is developed. The main topic discussed is the dependence of the diffusion coefficient on the fit between the surface static potential and the internal cluster…
Natural and engineered media usually involve combinations of solid, fluid and porous layers, and accurate and stable modelling of wave propagation in such complex multilayered media is fundamental to evaluating their properties with…
Active turbulence in dense active systems is characterized by high vorticity on a length scale that is large compared to that of individual entities. We describe the properties of active turbulence as momentum propagation is screened by…
Eukaryotic cells adhere to extracellular matrix during the normal development of the organism, forming static adhesion as well as during cell motility. We study this process by considering a simplified coarse-grained model of a vesicle that…
The plasticity of amorphous solids undergoing shear is characterized by quasi-localized rearrangements of particles. While many models of plasticity exist, the precise relationship between plastic dynamics and the structure of a particle's…
The development of substrates with a switchable wettability is on a fast pace. The limit of switching frequencies and contact angle differences between substrate states are steadily pushed further. We investigate the behavior of a droplet…
We report experimental results on the rift formation between two freezing wax plates. The plates were pulled apart with constant velocity, while floating on the melt, in a way akin to the tectonic plates of the earth's crust. At slow…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
Surface phase transitions in surfactant adsorption layers are known to affect the dynamic properties of foams and to induce surface nucleation in freezing emulsion drops. Recently, these transitions were found to play a role in several…
The charge on an aggregate immersed in a plasma environment distributes itself over the aggregate's surface; this can be approximated theoretically by assuming a multipole distribution. The dipole-dipole (or higher order) charge…
We consider a finite, closed and selfbound many--body system in which a collective degree of freedom is excited. The redistribution of energy and momentum into a finite number of the non-collective degrees of freedom is referred to as…