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Tightly packed granular particles under shear often exhibit intriguing intermittencies, specifically, sudden stress drops that we refer to as quaking. To probe the nature of this phenomenon, we prototype a circular shear cell that is…
Activity-mediated unjamming of a confluent glassy system is crucial for several biological processes, such as embryogenesis and cancer metastasis. During these processes, the cells progressively change their junction properties,…
Although jammed packings of soft spheres exist in potential energy landscapes with a vast number of minima, when subjected to cyclic shear they may revisit the same configurations repeatedly. Simple hysteretic spin models, in which particle…
We report a simulation study for bottle-brush polymers grafted on a rigid backbone. Using a standard coarse-grained bead-spring model extensive molecular dynamics simulations for such macromolecules under good solvent conditions are…
We offer an alternative real-space description, based purely on activated processes, for the understanding of relaxation dynamics in hierarchical landscapes. To this end, we use the cluster model, a coarse-grained lattice model of a jammed…
The structure and vibrational density of states (VDOS) of polymer glasses are investigated using numerical simulations based on the classical Kremer-Grest bead-spring model. We focus on the roles of chain length and bending stiffness, the…
A systematic investigation is presented of grain boundaries and grain boundary networks in two dimensional flexible membranes with crystalline order. An isolated grain boundary undergoes a buckling transition at a critical value of the…
We investigate the crumpling of a sheet as it is repeatedly crushed onto itself by rolling it into a cylinder and twisting it axially while allowing the end-to-end length to evolve freely. As deduced from its plastic deformations, the sheet…
Both animal and plant tissue exhibit a nonlinear rheological phenomenon known as compression stiffening, or an increase in moduli with increasing uniaxial compressive strain. Does such a phenomenon exist in single cells, which are the…
In a recent paper [Phys. Rev. X 12, 031021], we reported experimental observations of ``ultrastable'' states in a shear-jammed granular system subjected to small-amplitude cyclic shear. In such states, all the particle positions and contact…
We propose a framework to model elastic properties of polycrystals by coupling crystal orientational degrees of freedom with elastic strains. Our model encodes crystal symmetries and takes into account explicitly the strain compatibility…
Elastomers are viscoelastic materials and their properties significantly depend on the loading rate. The actual stress experienced by these materials is the sum of equilibrium and dissipative (inelastic) terms. At very low loading rates we…
Cessation of flow in simple yield stress fluids results in a complex stress relaxation process that depends on the preceding flow conditions and leads to finite residual stresses. To assess the microscopic origin of this phenomenon, we…
A constitutive model is developed for the mechanical response of elastomers at finite strains. A polymer is treated as a network of linear chains linked by permanent (chemical crosslinks) and temporary (entanglements and van der Waals…
We report on the results of a molecular dynamics simulation study of binodal glassy systems, formed in the process of isochoric rapid quenching from a high-temperature fluid phase. The transition to vitreous state occurs due to concurrent…
There have been some interesting recent advances in understanding the notion of mechanical disorder in structural glasses and the statistical mechanics of these systems' low-energy excitations. Here we contribute to these advances by…
The mechanical properties of crystalline materials can be substantially modified under confinement. Such modified macroscopic properties are usually governed by the altered microstructures and internal stress fields. Here, we use a parallel…
We investigate how structural relaxation in mixtures with strong dynamical asymmetry is affected by the microscopic dynamics. Brownian and Newtonian dynamics simulations of dense mixtures of fast and slow hard spheres reveal a striking…
For nearly a century, introduction of nanoparticles to elastomers has yielded extraordinarily tough nanocomposites that are critical to technologies from actuators to tires. The mechanisms by which this reinforcement occurs have…
Wrinkling, creasing and folding are frequent phenomena encountered in biological and man-made bilayers made by thin films bonded to thicker and softer substrates often containing fibers. Paradigmatic examples of the latter are the skin, the…