Related papers: Pattern Formation in Phase-Separating Gels with Sp…
We investigate numerically, by a hybrid lattice Boltzmann method, the morphology and the dynamics of an emulsion made of a polar active gel, contractile or extensile, and an isotropic passive fluid. We focus on the case of a highly…
We present a study on swelling-induced circumferential buckling of tubular shaped gels. Inhomogeneous stress develops as gel swells under mechanical constraints, which gives rise to spontaneous buckling instability without external force.…
A model for a monolayer of two types of particles spontaneously forming ordered patterns is studied by a mesoscopic theory and by MC simulations. We assume hard-cores of the same size for both components, short-range attraction long-range…
A nematic liquid-crystal gel is a macroscopically homogeneous elastic medium with the rotational symmetry of a nematic liquid crystal. In this paper, we develop a general approach to the study of these gels that incorporates all underlying…
Various biological and chemical processes lead to the nucleation and growth of non-wetting fluid bubbles within the pore space of a granular medium, such as the formation of gas bubbles in liquid-saturated lake-bed sediments. In…
Colloidal gels are formed through the aggregation of attractive particles, whose size ranges from 10~nm to a few micrometers, suspended in a liquid. Such gels are ubiquitous in everyday life applications, from food products to paints or…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
In culture migrating and interacting amoeboid cells can form nematic liquid crystal phases. A polar nematic liquid crystal is formed if the interaction has a polar symmetry. One type of white blood cells (granulocytes) form clusters where…
Attractive colloidal particles can form a disordered elastic solid or gel when quenched into a two-phase region, if the volume fraction is sufficiently large. When the interactions are comparable to thermal energies the stress-bearing…
We exploit the controlled drying of millimeter-sized gel beads to investigate isotropic compression of colloidal fractal gels. Using a custom dynamic light scattering setup, we demonstrate that stresses imposed by drying on the bead surface…
Quasi two-dimensional pattern forming systems with spontaneously broken isotropy represent a novel symmetry class, that is experimentally accessible in electroconvection of homeotropically aligned liquid crystals. We present a weakly…
When processing dense emulsions, complex flows stretch and deform droplets to the point of breakup, changing the droplet size distribution and the mechanical properties of the final product. For steady homogeneous flows, a droplet's shape…
Elastic interactions arising from a difference of lattice spacing between two coherent phases can have a strong influence on the phase separation (coarsening) of alloys. If the elastic moduli are different in the two phases, the elastic…
We consider two dimensional dispersions of droplets of isotropic phase in a liquid with an XY-like order parameter, tilt, nematic, and hexatic symmetries being included. Strong anchoring boundary conditions are assumed. Textures for a…
Using the theory of elasticity of polymer gels we show that large-scale cross-link density patterns written into the structure of the network in the melt state, can be revealed upon swelling by monitoring the monomer density patterns. We…
In a nematic gel, the appearance of nematic order is accompanied by a spontaneous elongation of the gel parallel to the nematic director. If such a gel is made chiral, it has a tendency to form a cholesteric helical texture, in which local…
We study a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to investigate its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…
We consider a phenomenological continuum model for an active nematic fluid and show a universal, model independent, instability which renders the homogeneous nematic state unstable to order fluctuations. Using numerical and analytic tools…
A recent study has demonstrated that phase separation in binary liquid mixtures is arrested in the presence of elastic networks and can lead to a nearly uniformly-sized distribution of the dilute-phase droplets. At longer timescales, these…
Simulations show that when a phase-separated binary AB fluid is driven to flow past chemically patterned substrates in a microchannel, the fluid exhibits unique morphological instabilities. For the pattern studied, these instabilities give…