Related papers: Theory of Elastic Microphase Separation
Here homogenization theory is used to establish a connection between the symmetries of a periodic elastic structure associated with the microscopic properties of an elastic material and the material symmetries of the effective, macroscopic…
We study the self-assembly of colloidal microgel particles at a quasi-two-dimensional air-water interface of a drying droplet. Using bright-field microscopy, we demonstrate that increasing particle elasticity drives interfacial organization…
Periodic microphases universally emerge in systems for which short-range inter-particle attraction is frustrated by long-range repulsion. The morphological richness of these phases makes them desirable material targets, but our relatively…
Cells and other soft particles are often forced to flow in confined geometries in both laboratory and natural environments, where the elastic deformation induces an additional drag and pressure drop across the particle. In contrast with…
We present a generic mechanism by which reproducing microorganisms, with a diffusivity that depends on the local population density, can form stable patterns. It is known that a decrease of swimming speed with density can promote separation…
Motivated by the experimental study of Tayebi et al. [Nature Mater. 11, 1074 (2012)] on phase separation of stacked multi-component lipid bilayers, we propose a model composed of stacked two-dimensional Ising spins. We study both its static…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
We analyse the dynamics of different routes to collapse of a constrained polyelectrolyte gel in contact with an ionic bath. The evolution of the gel is described by a model that incorporates non-linear elasticity, Stefan-Maxwell diffusion…
Nonequilibrium phase transitions are routinely observed in both natural and synthetic systems. The ubiquity of these transitions highlights the conspicuous absence of a general theory of phase coexistence that is broadly applicable to both…
Although coarse-grained models have been widely used to explain exotic phenomena in complex fluids, such as droplet formation in living cells, these conventional approaches often fail to capture the intricate microscopic degrees of freedom…
The structure, thermodynamics and slow activated dynamics of the equilibrated metastable regime of glass-forming fluids remains a poorly understood problem of high theoretical and experimental interest. We apply a highly accurate…
Liquid crystal elastomers realize a fascinating new form of soft matter that is a composite of a conventional crosslinked polymer gel (rubber) and a liquid crystal. These {\em solid} liquid crystal amalgams, quite similarly to their…
Coherent elastic strain is an important but often neglected contribution to phase-separation thermodynamics in alloy systems where decomposed phases have appreciable lattice mismatch. We develop a thermodynamic framework that incorporates…
Microphase separation is common in active biological systems as exemplified by the separation of RNA and DNA-rich phases in the cell nucleus driven by the transcriptional activity of polymerase enzymes acting similarly to amphiphiles in a…
Materials with nanoscale phase separation are considered. These materials are formed by a mixture of several phases, so that inside one phase there exist nanosize inclusions of other phases, with random shapes and random spatial locations.…
We develop a new quantitative molecular theory of liquid-phase dipolar polymer gels. We model monomer units of the polymer network as a couple of charged sites separated by a fluctuating distance. For the first time, within the random phase…
We study dynamic heterogeneities in a model glass-former whose overlap with a reference configuration is constrained to a fixed value. The system phase-separates into regions of small and large overlap, so that dynamical correlations remain…
A novel two-leaflet description of lipid membranes is proposed. Within its framework, phase separation phenomena in multicomponent biological membranes are analyzed. As we show, interactions between the leaflets tend to suppress macroscopic…
Recent experimental results on the static or quasistatic response of granular materials have been interpreted to suggest the inapplicability of the traditional engineering approaches, which are based on elasto-plastic models (which are…
Phase separation routinely occurs in both living and synthetic systems. These phases are often complex and distinguished by features including crystallinity, nematic order, and a host of other nonconserved order parameters. For systems at…