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The electrohydrodynamics of vesicle suspensions is characterized by studying their pairwise interactions in applied DC electric fields in two dimensions. In the dilute limit, the rheology of the suspension is shown to vary nonlinearly with…
Soft particles display highly versatile properties with respect to hard colloids, even more so at fluid-fluid interfaces. In particular, microgels, consisting of a cross-linked polymer network, are able to deform and flatten upon adsorption…
Yielding of amorphous glasses and gels is a mechanically driven transformation of a material from the solid to liquid state on the experimental timescale. It is a ubiquitous fundamental problem of nonequilibrium physics of high importance…
Collective motion is a phenomenon observed across length scales in nature, from bacterial swarming and tissue migration to the flocking of animals. The mechanisms underlying this behavior vary significantly depending on the biological…
In molecular communications, the direct detection of signaling molecules may be challenging due to a lack of suitable sensors and interference in the environment. Motivated by research in molecular biology, we investigate an indirect…
By means of Langevin dynamics simulations, we investigate the gel formation of randomly functionalized polymers in solution, with the ability to form both intra- and intermolecular reversible bonds. Under highly dilute conditions, these…
Polymer gels with photo-responsive cross-links enable tunable mechanics and surface morphologies, making them promising for adaptive materials. While prior work on coumarin cross-linked gels has focused on photo-mediated events in dilute…
Biological adhesion is a critical mechanical function of complex organisms operating at multiple scales. At the cellular scale, cell-cell adhesion is remarkably tunable to enable both cohesion and malleability during development,…
Using computer simulations, we identify the mechanisms causing aggregation and structural arrest of colloidal suspensions interacting with a short-ranged attraction at moderate and high densities. Two different non-ergodicity transitions…
Wrinkling instabilities of thin elastic sheets can be used to generate periodic structures over a wide range of length scales. Viscosity of the thin elastic sheet or its surrounding medium has been shown to be responsible for dynamic…
Locally (re)structuring colloidal gels $\unicode{x2013}$ micron-sized particles forming a connected network with arrested dynamics $\unicode{x2013}$ enables precise tuning of the micromechanical and -rheological properties of the system. A…
This paper reports on a new method of encapsulating BZ solution droplets in a powder coating of either polyethylene (PE) or polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), to produce BZ liquid marbles (LMs). The BZ LMs have solid--liquid interfaces in…
We perform extensive Molecular Dynamics simulations of an ensemble of realistic microgel particles in swollen conditions in a wide range of packing fractions $\zeta$. We compare neutral and charged microgels, where we consider charges…
Cellular biology abound with filaments interacting through fluids, from intracellular microtubules, to rotating flagella and beating cilia. While previous work has demonstrated the complexity of capturing nonlocal hydrodynamic interactions…
When a swollen, thermoresponsive polymer gel is heated in a solvent bath, it expels solvent and deswells. When this heating is slow, deswelling proceeds homogeneously, as observed in a toroid-shaped gel that changes volume whilst…
In cosmological first-order phase transitions, gravitational waves are generated by the collisions of bubble walls and by the bulk motions caused in the fluid. A sizeable signal may result from fast-moving walls. In this work we study the…
Hydrogels are soft materials engineered to suit a multitude of applications that exploit their tunable mechanochemical properties. Dynamic hydrogels employing noncovalent, physically crosslinked networks dominated by either enthalpic or…
From microactuators to biological tissues, non-porous materials with the ability to strongly expand when in contact with a solvent are ubiquitous. Consequently, the swelling of polymer systems such as hydrogel has received recently much…
Depending on the volume fraction and interparticle interactions, colloidal suspensions can form different phases, ranging from fluids, crystals, and glasses to gels. For soft microgels that are made from thermoresponsive polymers, the…
We introduce a simple model, a binary mixture of patchy particles, which has been designed to form a gel upon heating. Due to the specific nature of the particle interactions, notably the number and geometry of the patches as well as their…