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We study the appearance and evolution of an array of parallel cracks in a thin slab of material that is directionally dried, and show that the cracks penetrate the material uniformly if the drying front is sufficiently sharp. We also show…

Clusters are the dense inner regions of a wide-spread hierarchy of young stellar structures. They often reveal a continuation of this hierarchy inside of them, to smaller scales, when they are young, but orbital mixing eventually erases…

Drying of bacterial suspensions is frequently encountered in a plethora of natural and engineering processes. However, the evaporation-driven mechanical instabilities of dense consolidating bacterial suspensions have not been explored…

Drying complex fluids is a common phenomenon where a liquid phase transforms into a dense or porous solid. This transformation involves several physical processes, such as the diffusion of liquid molecules into the surrounding atmosphere…

Dislocations, as topological defects in crystal lattices, are fundamental to understanding plasticity in materials. Similar periodic structures also arise in continuum field theories, such as chiral soliton lattices (CSLs), which appear in…

Geometrically, foams or covalent graphs can be decomposed into successive layers or strata. Disorder of the underlying structure imposes a characteristic roughening of the layers. Our main results are hysteresis and convergence in the layer…

Crystalline materials deform in an intermittent way via dislocation-slip avalanches. Below a critical stress, the dislocations are jammed within their glide plane due to long-range elastic interactions and the material exhibits plastic…

The "melting" of self-formed rigid structures made of a small number of interacting classical particles confined in an irregular two-dimensional space is investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that the interplay of…

The complex physics of self-assembly in colloidal crystals on deformable interfaces and surfaces poses interesting possibilities for the designability and synthesis of next-generation metamaterials. The goal of this article is to…

We study thin self-assembled columns constrained to lie on a curved, rigid substrate. The curvature presents no local obstruction to equally spaced columns in contrast to curved crystals for which the crystalline bonds are frustrated.…

Active particles with a (magnetic) dipole moment are of interest for steering self-propelled motion, but also result in novel collective effects due to their dipole-dipole interaction. Here systems of active dipolar particles are studied…

The primary building block of the body is collagen, which is found in the extracellular matrix and in many stress-bearing tissues such as tendon and cartilage. It provides elasticity and support to cells and tissues while influencing…

Force networks form the skeleton of static granular matter. They are the key ingredient to mechanical properties, such as stability, elasticity and sound transmission, which are of utmost importance for civil engineering and industrial…

A complex network approach on a rough fracture is developed. In this manner, some hidden metric spaces (similarity measurements) between apertures profiles are set up and a general evolutionary network in two directions (in parallel and…

Via simulations of flowing foam, we connect the high and intermediate density regimes of complex fluid flows into a consistent microscopic picture of deformation. While at and above the jamming transition, elastic correlations lead to…

The steady state reached by a system of particles sliding down a fluctuating surface has interesting properties. Particle clusters form and break rapidly, leading to a broad distribution of sizes and large fluctuations. The density-density…

We demonstrate a variety of ordered patterns, including hexagonal structures and chains, formed by colloidal particles (droplets) at the free surface of a nematic liquid crystal (LC). The surface placement introduces a new type of particle…

Langmuir monolayers are modeled as systems of short chains, which are confined to a planar surface at one end, but free to move within the plane. The phase behavior is calculated in a mean field approximation, which combines the self…

Neuronal networks constitute a special class of dynamical systems, as they are formed by individual geometrical components, namely the neurons. In the existing literature, relatively little attention has been given to the influence of…

Granular materials show inhomogeneous flows characterized by strain localization. When strain is localized in a sheared granular material, rigid regions of a nearly undeformed state are separated by shear bands, where the material yields…