Related papers: Non-affinity of liquid networks and bicontinuous m…

Liquid-liquid phase separation, whereby two liquids spontaneously demix, is ubiquitous in industrial, environmental, and biological processes. While isotropic fluids are known to condense into spherical droplets in the binodal region, these…

Deformation due to embedded fluidic networks is currently studied in the context of soft-actuators and soft-robotics. Expanding on this concept, beams can be designed so that the pressure in the channel-network is created directly from…

The most profound effect of disorder on the elastic response of solids is the nonaffinity of local displacements whereby the atoms (particles, network junctions) do not simply follow the macroscopic strain, as they do in perfect crystals,…

Networks of semiflexible or stiff polymers such as most biopolymers are known to deform inhomogeneously when sheared. The effects of such non-affine deformation have been shown to be much stronger than for flexible polymers. To date, our…

We present a theory for the elasticity of cross-linked stiff polymer networks. Stiff polymers, unlike their flexible counterparts, are highly anisotropic elastic objects. Similar to mechanical beams stiff polymers easily deform in bending,…

We study the elasticity of random fiber networks. Starting from a microscopic picture of the non-affine deformation fields we calculate the macroscopic elastic moduli both in a scaling theory and a self-consistent effective medium theory.…

Amphiphiles are molecules which have both hydrophilic and hydrophobic parts. In water- and/or oil-like solvent, they self-assemble into extended sheet-like structures due to the hydrophobic effect. The free energy of an amphiphilic system…

Liquid-crystal networks consist of weakly crosslinked polymers that are coupled to liquid-crystal molecules. The resultant hybrid system has rich elastic properties. We develop a phase field model to describe mechanical properties of a…

Networks and dense suspensions frequently reside near a boundary between soft (or fluid-like) and rigid (or solid-like) regimes. Transitions between these regimes can be driven by changes in structure, density, or applied stress or strain.…

The thermodynamics and dynamics of supercooled liquids correlate with their elasticity. In particular for covalent networks, the jump of specific heat is small and the liquid is {\it strong} near the threshold valence where the network…

We study networks of coupled bistable elastic elements, recently proposed as a model for crumpled thin sheets. The networks are poised on the verge of a localized instability, and the model allows unique access to both local and global…

Previous research on semiflexible polymers including cytoskeletal networks in cells has suggested the existence of distinct regimes of elastic response, in which the strain field is either uniform (affine) or non-uniform (non-affine) under…

Motivated by the very low diffusivity recently found in ab initio simulations of liquid water, we have studied its dependence with temperature, system size, and duration of the simulations. We use ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD),…

Amphiphilic polymer co-networks (APCNs) provide a large toolbox for tuning coatings important for applications such as bio-interfaces. Therefore, we investigate the influence of network composition and environmental conditions on the…

For various engineering and industrial applications it is desirable to realize mechanical systems with broadly adjustable elasticity to respond flexibly to the external environment. Here we discover a topology-correlated transition between…

When a fluid comprised of multiple phases or constituents flows through a network, non-linear phenomena such as multiple stable equilibrium states and spontaneous oscillations can occur. Such behavior has been observed or predicted in a…

The elastic properties of a self-assembled bilayer membrane are studied using the self-consistent field theory, applied to a model system composed of flexible amphiphilic chains dissolved in hydrophilic polymeric solvents. Examining the…

Athermal models of disordered fibrous networks are highly useful for studying the mechanics of elastic networks composed of stiff biopolymers. The underlying network architecture is a key aspect that can affect the elastic properties of…

The validity of the affine assumption in model flexible polymer networks is explored. To this end, the displacements of fluorescent tracer beads embedded in polyacrylamide gels are quantified by confocal microscopy under shear deformation,…

Networks of filamentous proteins play a crucial role in cell mechanics. These cytoskeletal networks, together with various crosslinking and other associated proteins largely determine the (visco)elastic response of cells. In this letter we…