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Biomolecular condensates are small droplets forming spontaneously in biological cells via phase separation. They play a role in many cellular processes, but it is unclear how cells control them. Cellular regulation often relies on…
Water condensation on superhydrophobic surfaces can generate spontaneous droplet jumping, enabling rapid condensate removal and improved thermal and mass transfer. Although this effect has been extensively demonstrated on densely packed…
Active nematics are out-of-equilibrium systems in which energy injection at the microscale drives emergent collective behaviors, from spontaneous flows to active turbulence. While the dynamics of these systems have been extensively studied,…
Microcapsules are a key class of microscale materials with applications in areas ranging from personal care to biomedicine, and with increasing potential to act as extracellular matrix (ECM) models of hollow organs or tissues. Such capsules…
Dense suspensions of soft colloidal particles display a broad range of physical and rheological properties which are still far from being fully understood. To elucidate the role of deformability on colloidal flow, we employ computer…
Biomolecular condensates help organize the cell cytoplasm and nucleoplasm into spatial compartments with different chemical compositions. A key feature of such compositional patterning is the local enrichment of enzymatically active…
Electrospray technology enables external electric fields to steer charged droplets, with potential applications in fuel-air mixing and aerodynamic flow control. This study develops a computational framework that couples a steady OpenFOAM…
Nature is remarkably adept at using interfaces to build structures, encapsulate reagents, and regulate biological processes. Inspired by Nature, we describe flexible polymer-based ribbons, termed "mesoscale polymers" (MSPs), to modulate…
Biological cells use droplets to separate components and spatially control their interior. Experiments demonstrate that the complex, crowded cellular environment affects the droplet arrangement and their sizes. To understand this behavior,…
We study theoretically the self-propulsion dynamics of a small droplet on general curved surfaces by a variational approach. A new reduced model is derived based on careful computations for the capillary energy and the viscous dissipation…
We consider the problem of slow activation dynamics in glassy systems undergoing a random first order phase transition. Using an effective potential approach to supercooled liquids, we determine the spectrum of activation barriers for…
Fluid droplets can be induced to move over rigid or flexible surfaces under external or body forces. We describe the effect of variations in material properties of a flexible substrate as a mechanism for motion. In this paper, we consider a…
Mechanical properties are of central importance to materials sciences, in particular if they depend on external stimuli. Here we investigate the rheological response of amorphous solids, namely col- loidal glasses, to external forces. Using…
Fast and programmable transport of liquid droplets on a solid substrate is desirable in microfluidic, thermal, biomedical, and energy devices. Past research has focused on designing substrates with asymmetric structures or gradient…
Motion control of droplets has generated much attention for its applications to microfluidics, where precise control of small fluid volumes is an imperative requirement. Mechanical vibrations have been shown to be effective at inducing…
We describe a setup to perform systematic studies on the spreading of droplets of complex fluids under microgravity conditions. Tweaking the gravitational acceleration under which droplets are deposited provides access to different regimes…
We propose a simple model to analyze the traffic of droplets in microfluidic ``dual networks''. Such functional networks which consist of two types of channels, namely those accessible or forbidden to droplets, often display a complex…
We propose a mechanism to control the formation of stable obstructions in two-dimensional micro-channels of variable sections taking advantage of the peculiar clustering property of active systems. Under the activation of the…
We present a continuum level analytical model of a droplet of active contractile fluid consisting of filaments and motors. We calculate the steady state flows that result from a splayed polarisation of the filaments. We account for the…
Glassy systems are disordered systems characterized by extremely slow dynamics. Examples are supercooled liquids, whose dynamics slow down under cooling. The specific pattern of slowing-down depends on the material considered. This…