Related papers: Dynamical phase transition in the growth of progra…
Amorphous materials driven away from equilibrium display a diverse repertoire of complex, history-dependent behaviors. One striking feature is a failure to return to equilibrium after an abrupt change in otherwise static external…
The field of complex self-assembly is moving toward the design of multi-particle structures consisting of thousands of distinct building blocks. To exploit the potential benefits of structures with such `addressable complexity,' we need to…
The design of desired behaviors in mechanical metamaterials has produced remarkable advances but has generally neglected two aspects - the inevitable presence of undesired behaviors and the role of dynamics in avoiding such behaviors.…
Shape-morphing metamaterials enable adaptive structures capable of complex functional deformations, with applications ranging from reconfigurable structures and soft robotics to medical devices. However, their design remains challenging due…
When liquid-crystal elastomers are prepared without any alignment, disordered polydomain structures emerge as the materials are cooled into the nematic phase. These polydomain structures have been attributed to quenched disorder in the…
A machine learning approach is presented to accelerate the computation of block polymer morphology evolution for large domains over long timescales. The strategy exploits the separation of characteristic times between coarse-grained…
Nanocomposite materials made of block copolymer and nanoparticles display properties which can be different from the purely polymeric matrix. The resulting material is a crossover of the original properties of the block copolymer and the…
The fabrication of versatile building blocks that are reliably self-assemble into desired ordered and disordered phases is amongst the hottest topics in contemporary material science. To this end, microscopic units of varying complexity,…
Amorphous multi-element materials offer unprecedented tunability in composition and properties, yet their rational design remains challenging due to the lack of predictive structure-property relationships and the vast configurational space.…
We investigate the evolutionary dynamics of an idealised model for the robust self-assembly of two-dimensional structures called polyominoes. The model includes rules that encode interactions between sets of square tiles that drive the…
Assessing the synthesizability of inorganic materials is a grand challenge for accelerating their discovery using computations. Synthesis of a material is a complex process that depends not only on its thermodynamic stability with respect…
The physics of disordered media, from metallic glasses to colloidal suspensions, granular matter and biological tissues, offers difficult challenges because it often occurs far from equilibrium, in materials lacking symmetries and evolving…
Simple local interactions can cause primitive building blocks to self-assemble into complex and functional patterns. However, even for a small number of blocks, there exist a vast number of possible configurations that are plausible,…
We show that driven dislocation assemblies exhibit a set of dynamical phases remarkably similar to those of driven systems with quenched disorder such as vortices in superconductors, magnetic domain walls, and charge density wave materials.…
Composite materials are used across engineering applications for their superior mechanical performance, a result of efficient load transfer between the structure and matrix phases. However, the inherently two-dimensional structure of…
Equilibrium self-assembly and conventional materials processing techniques fall far short of mimicking dynamic self-actuating processes that are commonplace throughout biology. To bridge the gap between living and synthetic matter, we study…
Phase separation of multicomponent liquid mixtures plays an integral part in many processes ranging from industry to cellular biology. In many cases the morphology of coexisting phases is crucially linked to the function of the separated…
Allosteric interactions occur when binding at one part of a complex affects the interactions at another part. Allostery offers a high degree of control in multi-species processes, and these interactions play a crucial role in many…
If particles interact according to isotropic pair potentials that favor multiple length scales, in principle a large variety of different complex structures can be achieved by self-assembly. We present, motivate, and discuss a conjecture…
Self-assembly is a fundamental concept in biology and of significant interest to nanotechnology. Significant progress has been made in characterizing and controlling the properties of the resulting structures, both experimentally and…