Related papers: Dynamic Soft Elasticity in Monodomain Nematic Elas…
We attribute similarities in the rheology of many soft materials (foams, emulsions, slurries, etc.) to the shared features of structural disorder and metastability. A generic model for the mesoscopic dynamics of ``soft glassy matter'' is…
Nematic elastomers and glasses are solids that display spontaneous distortion under external stimuli. Recent advances in the synthesis of sheets with controlled heterogeneities have enabled their actuation into non-trivial shapes with…
Dielectric relaxation of materials provides important information on the polarisation dynamics at different time scales. We study the dielectric relaxation of a nematic liquid crystal under steady rotational shear and simultaneously measure…
Using molecular dynamics simulation, we calculate fluctuations and response for steadily sheared hard spheres over a wide range of packing fractions $\phi$ and shear strain rates $\gamma$, using two different methods to dissipate energy. To…
Constitutive equations are proposed for the relaxation of a glassy material in contact with a thermal reservoir. The dynamics of a single state variable, identified as an effective temperature accounts for the emergence of glassy behavior…
Nematic liquid crystals exhibit both crystal-like and fluid-like features. In particular, the propagation of an acoustic wave shows an unexpected occurrence of some of the solid-like features at the hydrodynamic level, namely, the…
The complex shear modulus of solid $^4$He exhibits an anomaly in the same temperature region where torsion oscillators show a change in period. We propose that the observed stiffening of the shear modulus with decreasing temperature can be…
We observe a surprisingly general power law decay at short to intermediate times in orientational relaxation in a variety of model systems (both calamitic and discotic, and also discrete) for thermotropic liquid crystals. As all these…
Liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) are soft phase-changing solids that exhibit large reversible contractions upon heating, Goldstone-like soft modes and resultant microstructural instabilities. We heat a planar LCE slab to isotropic, clamp…
We introduce a new class of non-isothermal models describing the evolution of nematic liquid crystals and prove their consistency with the fundamental laws of classical Thermodynamics. The resulting system of equations captures all…
We have investigated the nature of the dynamical behaviour in low autocorrelation binary sequences. These models do have a glass transition $T_G$ of a purely dynamical nature. Above the glass transition the dynamics is not fully ergodic and…
We report the results of a molecular dynamics simulation of a supercooled binary Lennard-Jones mixture. By plotting the self intermediate scattering functions vs. rescaled time, we find a master curve in the $\beta$-relaxation regime. This…
When liquid-crystalline elastomers pass through the isotropic-nematic transition, the orientational order parameter and the elastic strain vary rapidly but smoothly, without the expected first-order discontinuity. This broadening of the…
We study the anomalous elasticity of nematic elastomers by employing the powers of renormalized field theory. Using general arguments of symmetry and relevance, we introduce a minimal Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson elastic energy for nematic…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
The elastic response of a two-dimensional amorphous solid to induced local shear transformations, which mimic the elementary plastic events occurring in deformed glasses, is investigated via Molecular Dynamics simulations. We show that for…
Thermo-elasticity couples the deformation of an elastic (solid) body to its temperature and vice-versa. It is a solid-like property. Highlighting such property in liquids is a paradigm shift: it requires long-range collective interactions…
For a deeply supercooled liquid just above its glass transition temperature, we present a simple thermodynamic model, where the deeply supercooled liquid is assumed to be a mixture of solid-like and liquid-like micro regions. The mole…
We present an experimental investigation of the non stationary frictional properties of multicontact interfaces between rough elastomers and rough hard glass at low velocities (<= 200 mu m s^{-1}). These systems, for which the deformation…
It has been reported that slow dynamic nonlinear elastic relaxations, widely thought to proceed in proportion to the logarithm of time since mechanical conditioning ceases, recover at a diminished rate at early times, with a time of…