Related papers: How Soft is Too Soft? Tuning Order and Disorder in…
Digital stiffness programmability is fulfilled with a heterogeneous mechanical metamaterial. The prototype consists of an elastomer matrix containing tessellations of diamond shaped cavities selectively confined with semi-rigid plastic beam…
Soft-granular media, such as dense emulsions, foams or tissues, exhibit either fluid- or solid-like properties depending on the applied external stresses. Whereas bulk rheology of such materials has been thoroughly investigated, the…
We studied the Soret effect in binary dimer-monomer mixtures using non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations and investigated the pure contribution of the internal degree of freedom of flexible molecules to the Soret effect. We…
Disorder in crystals is rarely random, and instead involves local correlations whose presence and nature are hidden from conventional crystallographic probes. This hidden order can sometimes be controlled, but its importance for physical…
Empirical evidence in heavy fermion, pnictide, and other systems suggests that unconventional superconductivity appears associated to some form of real-space electronic order. For the cuprates, despite several proposals, the emergence of…
Understanding polymorph selection in atomic and molecular systems and its control through thermodynamic conditions and external factors (such as seed characteristics) is fundamental to the design of targeted materials and holds great…
Cellularized tissue and polymer networks can both transition from floppy to rigid as a function of their control parameters, and, yet, the two systems often mechanically interact, which may affect their respective rigidities. To study this…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
Chiral polymers are ubiquitous in nature and in the cellular context they are often found in association with membranes. Here we show that surface bound polymers with an intrinsic twist and anisotropic bending stiffness can exhibit a sharp…
Effects of three-point direct correlation on properties of the phase field crystal (PFC) modeling are examined, for the control of various ordered and disordered phases and their coexistence in both three-dimensional and two-dimensional…
We numerically investigate and experimentally demonstrate an in-situ topological band transition in a highly tunable mechanical system made of cylindrical granular particles. This system allows us to tune its inter-particle stiffness in a…
The ability to tune the microstructures formed by block copolymers using accessible physical approaches provides control for practical material applications. A common strategy involves the addition of homopolymers, which can induce…
For biologically relevant macromolecules such as intrinsically disordered proteins, internal degrees of freedom that allow for shape changes have a large influence on both the motion and function of the compound. A detailed understanding of…
In this paper, we present a 2D numerical model developed to simulate the dynamics of soft, deformable particles. To accommodate significant particle deformations, the particle surface is represented as a narrow shell composed of mass points…
Through extensive molecular simulations we determine a phase diagram of attractive, flexible polymer chains in two and three dimensions. A surprisingly rich collection of distinct crystal morphologies appear, which can be finely tuned…
Soft matter systems are common in nature and make up nearly all the essential components necessary for life, from cells to the organelles within those cells. The ability of these soft materials to deform is crucial for the proper…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
Coupled micro- and nanomechanical resonators are of significant interest within a number of areas of research, ranging from synchronisation, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, to quantum sensing and transduction. Building upon our work on…
Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans and behaviors. It…
Soft particles are known to overlap and form stable clusters that self-assemble into periodic crystalline phases with density-independent lattice constants. We use molecular dynamics simulations in two dimensions to demonstrate that,…