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Crystalline materials, such as metals and semiconductors, nearly always contain a special defect type called dislocation. This defect decisively determines many important material properties, e.g., strength, fracture toughness, or…
Brittle fracturing of materials is common in natural and industrial processes over a variety of length scales. Knowledge of individual particle dynamics is vital to obtain deeper insight into the atomistic processes governing crack…
Low energy interactions between particles are often characterised by elastic scattering. Just as electrons undergo Thomson scattering with photons, dark matter particles may experience an analogous form of momentum exchange with dark…
Decades of hardware, methodological, and algorithmic development have propelled molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to the forefront of materials-modeling techniques, bridging the gap between electronic-structure theory and continuum…
Slender beams are often employed as constituents in engineering materials and structures. Prior experiments on lattices of slender beams have highlighted their complex failure response, where the interplay between buckling and fracture…
The mechanics of single-chain stretching and rupture are central to understanding the resilience of biological polymers and designing strong and tough soft materials such as double-network gels and multi-network elastomers. In this work, we…
A variety of studies have modeled the physics of material deformation and damage as examples of generalized phase transitions, involving either critical phenomena or spinodal nucleation. Here we study a model for frictional sliding with…
Proteins often exhibit subdiffusive configurational dynamics. The origins of this subdiffusion are still unresolved. We investigate the impact of non-Markovian friction and the free energy landscape on the dynamics of fast-folding proteins…
Nanoscale materials display enhanced strength and toughness but also larger fluctuations and more pronounced size effects with respect to their macroscopic counterparts. Here we study the system size-dependence of the failure strength…
During plastic deformation, metals change shape while continuously becoming stronger. The microscopic origin of these processes lies in the proliferation and movement of line defects, dislocations, and the subsequent self-organisation and…
Cosmological models where dark matter interacts with dark energy via a pure momentum transfer and with no energy exchange (i.e. elastic) provide compelling scenarios for addressing the apparent lack of structures at low redshift. In…
Recently the materials possessing structure of molecular and supramolecular matrix are more and more actively studied. They are relative to many polymeric materials of a technological origin, such as rubber, and living biological tissues.…
Living systems operate far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Enzymatic activity can induce broken detailed balance at the molecular scale. This molecular scale breaking of detailed balance is crucial to achieve biological functions such as…
Disordered filamentous networks with compliant crosslinks exhibit a low linear elastic shear modulus at small strains, but stiffen dramatically at high strains. Experiments have shown that the elastic modulus can increase by up to three…
The rupture of a medium under stress typifies breakdown phenomena. More generally, the latter encompass the dynamics of systems of many interacting elements governed by the interplay of a driving force with a pinning disorder, resulting in…
The spectrum and scale of fluctuations in protein structures affect the range of cell phenomena, including stability of protein structures or their fragments, allosteric transitions and energy transfer. The study presents a…
The failure of mechanical metamaterials is a function of the interplay between the properties of the base material and the microstructural geometry. Stochastic failure properties of the base material and disordered microstructural…
Glass transitions are widely observed in various types of soft matter systems. However, the physical mechanism of these transitions remains {elusive}, despite years of ambitious research. In particular, an important unanswered question is…
Multi-phase materials, such as composite materials, exhibit multiple competing failure mechanisms during the growth of a macroscopic defect. For the simulation of the overall fracture process in such materials, we develop a two-phase spring…
Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics (LEFM) provides a consistent framework to evaluate quantitatively the energy flux released to the tip of a growing crack. Still, the way in which the crack selects its velocity in response to this energy…