Related papers: Thermodynamics of microphase separation in a swoll…
Bicontinuous microstructures are essential to the function of diverse natural and synthetic systems. Their synthesis has been based on two approaches: arrested phase separation or self-assembly of block copolymers. The former is attractive…
Elastic microphase separation refers to equilibrium patterns that form by phase separation in elastic gels. Recent experiments revealed a continuous phase transition from the homogeneous phase to a regularly patterned phase, whose period…
Inspired by recent experiments, we present a phase-field model of microphase separation in an elastomer swollen with a solvent. The imbalance between the molecular scale of demixing and the mesoscopic scale beyond which elasticity operates…
Phase separation of a liquid mixture embedded within an elastic network is relevant to a wide range of natural and industrial systems, including biomolecular condensates interacting with the cytoskeleton, structural colouring in bird…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
Phase separation has recently emerged as an important organizational principle in the dense and heterogeneous environment within living cells. Here, we use a synthetic system to show that compressive stresses in a polymer network suppress…
We propose a novel phase-field model to predict elastic microphase separation in polymer gels. To this end, we extend the Cahn-Hilliard free-energy functional to incorporate an elastic strain energy and a coupling term. These contributions…
Filamentous bio-materials such as fibrin or collagen networks exhibit an enormous stiffening of their elastic moduli upon large deformations. This pronounced nonlinear behavior stems from a significant separation between the stiffnesses…
We study the thermodynamics of binary mixtures with the volume fraction of the minority component less than the amount required to form a flat interface and show that the surface tension dominated equilibrium phase of the mixture forms a…
Phase separation within polymer networks plays a central role in shaping the structure and mechanics of both synthetic materials and living cells, including the formation of biomolecular condensates within cytoskeletal networks. Previous…
We employ a mathematical model to analyze stress chains in thermoplastic elastomers (TPEs) with a microphase-separated spherical structure composed of triblock copolymers. The model represents stress chains during uniaxial and biaxial…
Disordered athermal biopolymer materials, such as collagen networks that constitute a major component in extracellular matrices and various connective tissues, are initially soft and compliant but stiffen dramatically under strain. Such…
A recent study has demonstrated that phase separation in binary liquid mixtures is arrested in the presence of elastic networks and can lead to a nearly uniformly-sized distribution of the dilute-phase droplets. At longer timescales, these…
We investigate the possibility of a striped inhomoegenous phase occurring as an electronic system with an order parameter linearly coupled to the elastic degrees of freedom is tuned through the electronic phase transition. We find that in…
We present a novel formalism to characterize elastic heterogeneities in amorphous solids. In particular, we derive high-order strain-energy expansions for pairwise energies under athermal quasistatic dynamics. We then use the presented…
Whereas entropy can induce phase behavior that is as rich as seen in energetic systems, microphase separation remains a very rare phenomenon in entropic systems. In this paper, we present a density functional approach to study the…
Most of the commercially important alloys are multicomponent, producing multiphase microstructures as a result of processing. When the coexisting phases are elastically coherent, the elastic interactions between these phases play a major…
Active semiflexible filaments are crucial in various biophysical processes, yet insights into their single-filament behavior have predominantly relied on theory and simulations, owing to the scarcity of controllable synthetic systems. Here,…
Thermally-driven semi-crystalline polymer networks are capable to achieve both the one-way shape-memory effect and two-way shape-memory effect under stress and stress-free conditions, therefore representing an appealing class of polymers…
We propose a continuum theory of the liquid-liquid phase separation in an elastic network where phase-separated microscopic droplets rich in one fluid component can form as an interplay of fluids mixing, droplet nucleation, network…