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The elastic properties of a soft matter material can be greatly altered by the presence of solid inclusions whose microscopic properties, such as their size and interactions, can have a dramatic effect. In order to shed light on these…

Using three-dimensional Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations, we investigate the erosion dynamics of a cohesive bed composed of wet spherical particles subjected to the shear flow of an overlying non-cohesive granular layer. Cohesion…

Extreme deformation of soft matter is central to our understanding of the effects of shock, fracture, and phase change in a variety of systems. Yet, despite, the increasing interest in this area, far-from-equilibrium behaviours of soft…

Identifying the necessary conditions for the onset of rigidity in a gel remains a challenge. It has been suggested that local particle coordination could be used to establish such conditions, but rigid gels occur for various coordination…

When stressed sufficiently, solid materials yield and deform plastically via reorganization of microscopic constituents. Indeed, it is possible to alter the micro-structure of materials by judicious application of stress, an empirical pro-…

Soft colloids are increasingly used as model systems to address fundamental issues such as crystallisation and the glass and jamming transitions. Among the available classes of soft colloids, microgels are emerging as the gold standard.…

Computer simulations were used to study the gel transition occurring in colloidal systems with short range attractions. A colloid-polymer mixture was modelled and the results were compared with mode coupling theory expectations and with the…

Particles added to a fluid interface can be used as a surface stabilizer in the food, oil and cosmetic industries. As an alternative to rigid particles, it is promising to consider highly deformable particles that can adapt their…

The settling of colloidal particles with short-ranged attractions is investigated via highly resolved immersed boundary simulations. At modest volume fractions, we show that inter-colloid attractions lead to clustering that reduces the…

In granular media, the presence of even small amounts of interparticle cohesion manifests as an increase in the bulk strength and stiffness, effects that are typically associated with an increase in the average number of constraints per…

Magnetic gels and elastomers are promising candidates to construct reversibly excitable soft actuators, triggered from outside by magnetic fields. These magnetic fields induce or alter the magnetic interactions between discrete rigid…

Stress induced yielding/fluidization in disordered solids, characterized by irreversibility and enhanced dissipation, is important for a wide range of industrial and geological processes. Although, such phenomena in thermal systems have…

The equilibrium properties of polymer droplets on a soft deformable surface are investigated by molecular dynamics simulations of a bead-spring model. The surface consists of a polymer brush with irreversibly end-tethered linear homopolymer…

Spinodal demixing of systems into two phases having very different viscosities leads to viscoelastic networks, i.e. gels. Here we consider demixing in a colloidal system where one phase is a nematic liquid crystal with a strongly…

We propose the use of topographic modulation of surfaces to select and localize particles in nematic colloids. By considering convex and concave deformations of one of the confining surfaces we show that the colloid-flat surface repulsion…

Macroscopic elastic core-shell systems can be generated as toy models to be deformed and haptically studied by hand. On the mesoscale, colloidal core-shell particles and microgels are fabricated and investigated by different types of…

Non-bonded interactions govern structure, stability, and function across a wide range of solid-state materials, yet their chemical origins are often difficult to resolve from total energies alone. Here we generalize absolutely localized…

We demonstrate a novel route of spatially organizing the colloid arrangements on the polymer-grafted substrate by use of self-consistent field and density functional theories. We find that grafting of polymers onto a substrate can…

Entangled granular systems exhibit mechanical rigidity and resistance to deformation, reminiscent of cohesive materials, due to their reduced degrees of freedom and contact friction. A quantitative understanding of how classical granular…

Large deformations of soft elastic beads spinning at high angular velocity in a denser background fluid are investigated theoretically, numerically, and experimentally using millimeter-size polyacrylamide hydrogel particles introduced in a…