Related papers: Simple model for the kinetics of stimuli-responsiv…
Stimuli-responsive materials that modify their shape in response to changes in environmental conditions -- such as solute concentration, temperature, pH, and stress -- are widespread in nature and technology. Applications include micro- and…
The origin of the dramatic changes in the behavior of liquids as they approach their vitreous state - increases of many orders of magnitude in transport properties and dynamic time scales - is a major unsolved problem in condensed matter.…
We compare the slow dynamics of irreversible gels, colloidal gels, glasses and spin glasses by analyzing the behavior of the so called non-linear dynamical susceptibility, a quantity usually introduced to quantitatively characterize the…
We study the formation of a colloidal gel by means of Molecular Dynamics simulations of a model for colloidal suspensions. A slowing down with gel-like features is observed at low temperatures and low volume fractions, due to the formation…
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are smart materials that rapidly switch between hydrophilic (swollen) and hydrophobic (shrunken) states when heated past a threshold temperature, resulting in order-of-magnitude changes in gel volume. Modelling…
We investigate dynamical heterogeneities in the collective relaxation of a concentrated microgel system, for which the packing fraction can be conveniently varied by changing the temperature. The packing fraction dependent mechanical…
The macroscopic mechanical properties of colloidal particle gels strongly depend on the local arrangement of the powder particles. Experiments have shown that more heterogeneous microstructures exhibit up to one order of magnitude higher…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations to characterize the occurrence of inhomogeneous shear flows in soft jammed materials. We use rough walls to impose a simple shear flow and study the athermal motion of jammed assemblies of soft…
In this paper, we study stochastic homogenization of a coupled diffusion-reaction system. The diffusion-reaction system is coupled to stochastic differential equations, which govern the changes in the media properties. Though homogenization…
Rheological measurements of model colloidal gels reveal that large variations in the shear moduli as colloidal volume-fraction changes are not reflected by simple structural parameters such as the coordination number, which remains almost a…
We investigate the heterogeneous dynamics in a model, where chemical gelation and glass transition interplay, focusing on the dynamical susceptibility. Two independent mechanisms give raise to the correlations, which are manifested in the…
The concept of vibrational density of states in glasses has been mirrored in liquids by the instantaneous-normal-mode spectrum. While in glasses instantaneous configurations correspond to minima of the potential-energy hypersurface and all…
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are a promising material for creating controllable actuators for use in micro-scale devices, since they expand and contract significantly (absorbing or expelling fluid) in response to relatively small temperature…
Over times shorter than that required for relaxation of enthalpy, a liquid can exhibit striking heterogeneities. The picture of these heterogeneities is complex with transient patches of rigidity, irregular yet persistent, intersected by…
We present a study on swelling-induced circumferential buckling of tubular shaped gels. Inhomogeneous stress develops as gel swells under mechanical constraints, which gives rise to spontaneous buckling instability without external force.…
The slow flow of amorphous solids exhibits striking heterogeneities: swift localised particle rearrangements take place in the midst of a more or less homogeneously deforming medium. Recently, experimental as well as numerical work has…
External stress can accelerate molecular mobility of amorphous solids by several orders of magnitude. The changes in mobility are commonly interpreted through the Eyring model, which invokes an empirical activation volume whose origin…
Transitions in structural heterogeneity of colloidal depletion gels formed through short-range attractive interactions are correlated with their dynamical arrest. The system is a density and refractive index matched suspension of 0.20…
The effect of introducing a spatial heterogeneity into an explosive medium is studied computationally by examining the detonation velocity near the limit to propagation in a thin explosive layer. The explosive system studied is an ideal gas…
We study the role of elasticity-induced facilitation on the dynamics of glass-forming liquids by a coarse-grained two-dimensional model in which local relaxation events, taking place by thermal activation, can trigger new relaxations by…