Related papers: Inducing mechanical self-healing in glassy polymer…
Living organisms have mastered the dynamic control of internal stresses to perform an array of functions, such as change shape and locomote. State-of-the-art attempts to replicate this ability in synthetic materials are rudimentary in…
An extended Molecular-Dynamics study of the short-time "glassy" elasticity exhibited by a polymer melt of linear fully-flexible chains above the glass transition is presented. The focus is on the infinite-frequency shear modulus $G_\infty$…
We perform molecular dynamics simulations of an idealized polymer melt surrounding a nanoscopic filler particle to probe the effects of a filler on the local melt structure and dynamics. We show that the glass transition temperature $T_g$…
In this paper we focus on the mechanical properties of oligomeric glasses (waxes), employing a microscopic model that provides, via numerical simulations, information about the shear modulus of such materials, the failure mechanism via…
We combine computer simulations and analytical theory to investigate the glassy dynamics in dense assemblies of athermal particles evolving under the sole influence of self-propulsion. The simulations reveal that when the persistence time…
There is a growing evidence that relaxation in glassy materials, both spontaneous and externally driven, is mediated by localized soft spots. Recent progress made it possible to identify the soft spots inside glassy structures and to…
We present an experimental evidence of self-healing shear cracks at a gel/glass interface. This system exhibits two dynamical regimes depending on the driving velocity : steady sliding at high velocity (> Vc = 100-125 \mu m/s), caracterized…
In this work we use molecular simulations to examine methods of controlling mechanical properties of polymeric glass materials such as elastic moduli, mechanical heterogeneity as well as their glass transition temperature. We study filled…
The kinetic process of mechanical amorphization plays a central role in tailoring material properties. Therefore, a quantitative understanding of how this process depends on loading parameters is critical for optimizing mechanical…
We present an extensive experimental study and scaling analysis of friction of gelatin gels on glass. At low driving velocities, sliding occurs via propagation of periodic self-healing slip pulses whose velocity is limited by collective…
Via large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, we observe the melting of a topological glass of stiff ring polymers by incorporating flexible ring polymers, along an isobaric path. As more flexible ring polymers are introduced, cluster…
In this Perspective, I describe recent work on systems in which the traditional distinctions between (i) unentangled vs. well-entangled systems and (ii) melts vs. glasses seem least useful, and argue for the broader use in glassy polymer…
We numerically investigate the propagation of a self-compressed optical filament through a gas-glass-gas interface. Few-cycle light pulses survive a sudden and short order-of-magnitude increase of nonlinearity and dispersion, even when all…
Flexible electronic systems such as roll up displays, wearable devices etc. promise exciting possibilities that could change the way humans interact with the environment. However, they suffer from poor reliability of interconnects and…
The self-assembly of polymer grafted nanoparticles is more and more used in the field of functional materials. However, there is still a lack of analysis on the dynamic transformation paths of different self-assembly morphologies, which…
Free surfaces in glassy polymer films are known to induce surface mobile layers with enhanced dynamics. Using molecular dynamics simulations of a bead-spring model, we study a wide variety of layer-resolved structural and dynamical…
A phenomenon recently coined as ``overaging'' implies a slowdown in the collective (slow) relaxation modes of a glass when a transient shear strain is imposed. We are able to reproduce this behavior in simulations of a supercooled polymer…
The dynamics of many glassy systems are known to exhibit string-like hopping motions each consisting of a line of particles displacing one and other. By using molecular dynamics simulations of glassy polymers, we show that these motions…
Ageing of organic glasses to the equilibrium liquid state is studied by measuring the dielectric loss utilizing a microregulator where temperature is controlled by means of a Peltier element. Compared to conventional equipment the new…
A sheet of glassy polymers placed in a solvent shows swelling behaviors quite different from that of soft polymers (rubbers and gels). (1) Non-Fickian diffusion (called case II diffusion): As solvent permeates into the sample, a sharp front…