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Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…
There is growing interest in functional, adaptive devices built from colloidal subunits of micron size or smaller. A colloidal material with dynamic mechanical properties could facilitate such microrobotic machines. Here we study via…
The ability to control Poisson's ratio of functional materials has been one of the main objectives of researchers attempting to develop structures efficient from the perspective of protective, biomedical and soundproofing devices. This task…
Structures with artificial mechanical properties, often called mechanical metamaterials, exhibit divergent yet tunable performance. Various types of mechanical metamaterials have been proposed, which harness light or magnetic interactions,…
Motile living organisms routinely probe their surroundings to adapt in ever-evolving environments. Although synthetic microswimmers offer surrogates for self-propelled living entities, they often lack the complex feedback mechanisms that…
The properties of quantum materials are commonly tuned using experimental variables such as pressure, magnetic field and doping. Here we explore a different approach: irreversible, plastic deformation of single crystals. We show for the…
DNA-mediated multivalent interactions between colloidal particles have been extensively applied for their ability to program bulk phase behaviour and dynamic processes. Exploiting the competition between different types of DNA-DNA bonds,…
Microorganisms can create engineered materials with exquisite structures and living functionalities. Although synthetic biology tools to genetically manipulate microorganisms continue to expand, the bottom-up rational design of engineered…
Using Brownian dynamics (BD) simulations and an analytical approach we investigate the shear-induced, nonequilibrium dynamics of dense colloidal suspensions confined to a narrow slit-pore. Focusing on situations where the colloids arrange…
Brownian computers utilize thermal fluctuations as a resource for computation and hold promise for achieving ultra-low-energy computations. However, the lack of a statistical direction in Brownian motion necessitates the incorporation of…
We construct a theoretical model for the dynamics of a microscale colloidal particle, modeled as an interval, moving horizontally on a DNA-coated surface, modelled as a line coated with springs that can stick to the interval. Averaging over…
Brownian motion is a universal characteristic of colloidal particles embedded in a host medium, and it is the fingerprint of molecular transport or diffusion, a generic feature of relevance not only in Physics but also in several branches…
Brownian motion in one or more dimensions is extensively used as a stochastic process to model natural and engineering signals, as well as financial data. Most works dealing with multidimensional Brownian motion consider the different…
Many stochastic processes in the physical and biological sciences can be modelled as Brownian dynamics with multiplicative noise. However, numerical integrators for these processes can lose accuracy or even fail to converge when the…
A novel approach to account for hard-body interactions in (overdamped) Brownian dynamics simulations is proposed for systems with non-vanishing force fields. The scheme exploits the analytically known transition probability for a Brownian…
Confined motions in complex environments are ubiquitous in microbiology. These situations invariably involve the intricate coupling between fluid flow, soft boundaries, surface forces and fluctuations. In the present study, such a coupling…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
The rotational Brownian motion of colloidal spheres in dense suspensions reflects local hydrodynamics and friction, both key to non-linear rheological phenomena such as shear-thickening and jamming, and transport in crowded environments,…
Mechanical cloaks are materials engineered to manipulate the elastic response around objects to make them indistinguishable from their homogeneous surroundings. Typically, methods based on material-parameter transformations are used to…
The architectures of biological hard materials reveal finely tailored complex assemblies of mineral crystals. Numerous recent studies associate the design of these local assemblies with impressive macroscopic response. Reproducing such…