Related papers: Morphological instability at topological defects i…
Isoporous membranes made from diblock copolymers have numerous applications, including water treatment and protein separation, and are successfully produced at a laboratory scale under controlled conditions. However, achieving optimal…
Topology transcends boundaries that conventionally delineate physical, biological and engineering sciences. Our ability to mathematically describe topology, combined with our access to precision tracking and manipulation approaches, has…
Active matter encompasses different nonequilibrium systems in which individual constituents convert energy into non-conservative forces or motion at the microscale. This review provides an elementary introduction to the role of topology in…
Plasticity in amorphous solids is mediated by localized quadrupolar instabilities, but the mechanism by which an amorphous solid eventually fails or melts is debated. In this work we argue that these phenomena can be investigated in the…
Topological defects are distinctive signatures of liquid crystals. They profoundly affect the viscoelastic behavior of the fluid by constraining the orientational structure in a way that inevitably requires global changes not achievable…
Spherical particles confined to a sphere surface cannot pack densely into a hexagonal lattice without defects. In this study, we use hard particle Monte Carlo simulations to determine the effects of continuously deformable shape anisotropy…
Disclinations, first observed in mesomorphic phases, are relevant to a number of ill-ordered condensed matter media, with continuous symmetries or frustrated order. They also appear in polycrystals at the edges of grain boundaries. They are…
We study the phase behaviour of a quasi-two dimensional cholesteric liquid crystal shell. We characterise the topological phases arising close to the isotropic-cholesteric transition, and show that they differ in a fundamental way from…
Topological defects (TDs) are crucial for understanding important physical properties of crystalline materials including mechanical failure, ion transport, and two-dimensional melting. This concept has not translated to disordered materials…
We explore how thermal fluctuations affect the mechanics of thin amorphous spherical shells. In flat membranes with a shear modulus, thermal fluctuations increase the bending rigidity and reduce the in-plane elastic moduli in a…
The protein folding problem must ultimately be solved on all length scales from the atomic up through a hierarchy of complicated structures. By analyzing the stability of the folding process using physics and mathematics, this paper shows…
The Plateau-Rayleigh instability shows that a cylindrical fluid flow can be destabilized by surface tension. Similarly, capillary forces can make an elastic cylinder unstable when the elastocapillary length is comparable to the cylinder's…
Recent experimental observations have suggested that topological defects can facilitate the creation of sharp features in developing embryos. Whereas these observations echo established knowledge about the interplay between geometry and…
Morphological instabilities of growing tissues that impinge on passive materials are typical of invasive cancers. To explain these instabilities in experiments on breast epithelial spheroids in an extracellular matrix, we develop a…
Topological defects, which are singular points in a director field, play a major role in shaping active systems. Here, we experimentally study topological defects and the flow patterns around them, that are formed during the highly rapid…
We use molecular dynamics to study the ordering of a nematic liquid crystal around a spherical particle or droplet. Homeotropic boundary conditions and strong anchoring create a hedgehog director configuration on the particle surface and in…
We show that the stacking of flat aromatic molecules on a curved surface results in topological defects. We consider, as an example, spherical vesicles, self-assembled from molecules with 5- and 6-thiophene cores. We predict that the…
Liquid shells (e.g. double emulsions, vesicles etc.) are susceptible to interfacial instability and rupturing when driven out of mechanical equilibrium. This poses a significant challenge for the design of liquid shell based micro-machines,…
Thin solids often develop elastic instabilities and subsequently complex, multiscale deformation patterns. Revealing the organizing principles of this spatial complexity has ramifications for our understanding of morphogenetic processes in…
The mechanics of epithelial tissues, which is governed by forces generated in various cell domains, is often investigated using two-dimensional models that account for the apically-positioned actomyosin structures but neglect basolateral…