Related papers: From Vulcanization to Isotropic and Nematic Rubber…
For solving the longstanding materials science problem of correlating elastic properties of a solid material to the formation of cracks we present a new general concept. This concept is applied to the technologically most important cracks…
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…
A theory for the non-local stress in liquids captures the crossover from viscous to elastic correlations upon supercooling. It explains the emergence of long-ranged stress fields in glass which originate from the coupling of shear stress to…
Unlike hard materials such as metals and ceramics, rubbery materials can endure large deformations due to the large conformational degree of freedom of the crosslinked three-dimensional polymer network. However, the effect of the branching…
Wrinkles commonly develop in a thin film deposited on a soft elastomer substrate when the film is subject to compression. Motivated by recent experiments [Agrawal et al., Soft Matter 8, 7138 (2012)] that show how wrinkle morphology can be…
We consider a continuum model of active viscoelastic matter, whereby an active nematic liquid-crystal is coupled to a minimal model of polymer dynamics with a viscoelastic relaxation time $\tau_C$. To explore the resulting interplay between…
We predict spontaneous nematic order in an ensemble of active force generators with elastic interactions as a minimal model for early nematic alignment of short stress fibers in non-motile, adhered cells. Mean-field theory is formally…
A self-interacting polymer can undergo an orientational ordering transition, depending on the magnitude of the nematic interaction. The effect of embedding such a polymer into a flexible surface on this transition is studied on the…
In this work we will derive an anisotropic generalisation of the finitely extensible chain model, due to Kuhn and Gr\"un, which is well known in rubber elasticity. This provides a chain energy that couples elastic behaviour to a probability…
We present a minimal Landau theory of plastic-to-crystal phase transitions in which the key components are a multipole-moment order parameter that describes the orientational ordering of the constituent molecules, coupling between such…
We present a phenomenological time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau theory of nonlinear plastic deformations in solids. Because the problem is very complex, we first give models in one and two dimensions without vacancies and interstitials, where…
We study the mechanical response of a dislocation-free 2D crystal under homogenous shear using a new mesoscopic approach to crystal plasticity, a Landau-type theory, accounting for the global invariance of the energy in the space of strain…
Motivated by recent experiments on the supersolid behavior of $^4$He, we study the effect of an edge dislocation in promoting superfluidity in a Bose crystal. Using Landau theory, we couple the elastic strain field of the dislocation to the…
In this paper, we study an elastic bilayer plate composed of a nematic liquid crystal elastomer in the top layer and a nonlinearly elastic material in the bottom layer. While the bottom layer is assumed to be stress-free in the flat…
In this article, we construct and analyze models of anisotropic crosslinked polymers employing tools from the theory of liquid crystal elastomers. The anisotropy of these systems stems from the presence of rigid-rod molecular units in the…
We construct a phenomenological Landau-de Gennes theory for hard colloidal rods by performing an order parameter expansion of the chemical-potential dependent grand potential. By fitting the coefficients to known results of Onsager theory,…
Liquid crystal networks combine the orientational order of liquid crystals with the elastic properties of polymer networks, leading to a vast application potential in the field of responsive coatings, e.g., for haptic feedback,…
We discuss why it is physical to keep terms in the nematic rubber elastic free energy that reflect the order parameter dependence of the natural size of the network polymers. We address a point of difficulty in some mathematical approaches…
I study the buckling transition under compression of a two-dimensional, hexagonal, regular elastic honeycomb. Under isotropic compression, the system buckles to a configuration consisting of a unit cell containing four of the original…
Kramers relaxation times $\tau_{K}$ and relaxation times $\tau_{R}$ and $\tau_{G}$ for the end-to-end distances and for center of mass diffusion are calculated for dense systems of athermal lattice chains. $\tau_{K}$ is defined from the…