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Fluid mechanics can be formulated on dynamical surfaces of arbitrary co-dimension embedded in a background space-time. This has been the main object of study of the blackfold approach in which the emphasis has primarily been on stationary…
Soft solids with tunable mechanical response are at the core of new material technologies, but a crucial limit for applications is their progressive aging over time, which dramatically affects their functionalities. The generally accepted…
The equilibrium shape of liquid drops on elastic substrates is determined by minimising elastic and capillary free energies, focusing on thick incompressible substrates. The problem is governed by three length scales: the size of the drop…
Elastic geodesic grids (EGG) are lightweight structures that can be easily deployed to approximate designer provided free-form surfaces. In the initial configuration the grids are perfectly flat, during deployment, though, curvature is…
We study the behaviour of a specific system of relativistic elasticity in its own gravitational field: a static, spherically symmetric shell whose wall is of arbitrary thickness consisting of hyperelastic material. We give the system of…
Biological cells in soft materials can be modeled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. The corresponding elastic interaction potentials are long-ranged ($\sim 1/r^3$ with distance $r$) and depend sensitively on elastic constants,…
Nanoscale molecular transport plays a crucial role in regulating mass diffusion and responsiveness in condensed matter systems. In soft porous crystals, in particular, adsorption of guest molecules induces host framework deformation and…
Thin elastic sheets and membranes are known to wrinkle when they are stretched -- the associated physics is highly non-linear. The mechanics of thin films that exhibit unusual behavior upon stretching, when they possess auxetic structure,…
We propose a universal elastic energy for proteins, which depends only on the radius of gyration $R_{g}$ and the residue number $N$. It is constructed using physical arguments based on the hydrophobic effect and hydrogen bonding. Adjustable…
We study computationally the creep and yielding of athermal gels and fibre network materials under a constant imposed shear stress, within a minimal model of interconnected filaments with central forces in $d=2$ spatial dimensions. Each…
We show numerically that the response of simple amorphous solids (elastic networks and particle packings) to a local force dipole is characterized by a lengthscale $\ell_c$ that diverges as unjamming is approached as $\ell_c \sim (z -…
We consider a geometrically fully nonlinear variational model for thin elastic sheets that contain a single disclination. The free elastic energy contains the thickness $h$ as a small parameter. We give an improvement of a recently proved…
Developing a macroscopic theory of elasto-plasticity in amorphous solids calls for (i) identifying the relevant macro state-variables and (ii) discriminating the different time-scales which characterize these variables. In current theories…
During the life of animals, epithelial tissues undergo extensive deformations--first to form organs during embryogensis and later to preserve integrity and function in adulthood. To what extent these deformations resemble that of non-living…
A rectangular plate of dielectric elastomer exhibiting gradients of material properties through its thickness will deform inhomogeneously when a potential difference is applied to compliant electrodes on its major surfaces, because each…
We model the formation and evolution of wrinkles in a floating elastic sheet under uniaxial compression. This is a canonical setup in the study of wrinkling, and whilst its static equilibrium configuration is well characterised, its…
A growing or compressed thin elastic sheet adhered to a rigid substrate can exhibit a buckling instability, forming an inward hump. Our study shows that the strip morphology depends on the delicate balance between the compression energy and…
Instabilities in thin elastic sheets, such as wrinkles, are of broad interest both from a fundamental viewpoint and also because of their potential for engineering applications. Nematic liquid crystal elastomers offer a new form of control…
Assemblies of purely repulsive and frictionless particles, such as emulsions or hard spheres, display very curious properties near their jamming transition, which occurs at the random close packing for mono-disperse spheres. Although such…
We study equilibrium configurations of non-Euclidean plates, in which the reference metric is uniaxially periodic. This work is motivated by recent experiments on thin sheets of composite thermally responsive gels [1]. Such sheets bend…