软凝聚态物质
We employ mesoscopic simulations to study active polymers in a solvent via multi-particle collision dynamics. We investigate linear chains in which either the head or tail monomer exerts an active force, directed away from or towards its…
The self-amplifying creeping of salts can produce striking macroscopic structures, such as desert roses in arid regions and salt pillars near saline lakes. While these formations are visually remarkable, salt crystallization, often seen as…
Many mechanical structures, both engineered and biological, combine heavy rigid elements such as bones and beams with lightweight flexible ones such as cables and membranes. These are referred to as tensegrities, reflecting that cables can…
The liquid-liquid phase separation of biomolecules is an important process for intracellular organization. Biomolecular sequence combinatorics leads to a large variety of proteins and nucleic acids which can interact to form a diversity of…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
Bacteria invade surfaces by forming dense colonies encased in a polymer matrix. Successful settlement of founder bacteria, early microcolony development and later macroscopic spreading of these biofilms on surfaces rely on complex physical…
We demonstrate that several nonvariational continuum models commonly used to describe active matter as well as other active systems exhibit nongeneric behavior: each model supports asymmetric but stationary localized states even in the…
The spring network model constitutes the backbone in the representations of a host of physical systems. In this work, we report the disturbance-driven microscopic dynamics of an isolated, closed spring network of spherical topology in…
Bolaamphiphilesamphiphilic molecules with polar groups at each of the two ends of a hydrophobic tail with pH-sensitive spontaneous molecular curvaturesendow membranes of extremophiles with an exquisite balance between stability (or…
Active Stokesian suspensions are conventionally understood to generate dipolar stresses that destabilize aligned states in the bulk and drive system-wide spatiotemporally chaotic flows. Here, we report dynamics in suspensions of…
When an object is placed on a surface, friction and wear cause uncertainty in its exact position, and thus challenge precision manufacturing. Here, we explore the development of a sacrificial nanocrystal deposit that can suppress friction…
Fluids under nanoscale confinement differ -- and often dramatically -- from their bulk counterparts. A notorious feature of nanoconfined fluids is their inhomogeneous density profile along the confining dimension, which plays a key role in…
Adhesion plays a pivotal role in computer chip manufacturing, directly affecting the precision and durability of positioning components such as wafer stages. Electrical biasing is widely employed to eliminate floating potential and to…
In many viruses, hundreds of proteins assemble an outer shell (capsid) around the viral nucleic acid to form an infectious virion. How the assembly process selects the viral genome amidst a vast excess of diverse cellular nucleic acids is…
Shear cell tests have been conducted on twenty different lactose powders, most of which commercially available for oral or inhalation purposes, spanning a wide range of particle sizes, particle morphologies, production processes. The aims…
The precise arrangement of different chemical moieties in a polymer determines its thermophysical properties. How the sequence of moieties impacts the properties of a polymer is an outstanding problem in polymer science. Herein, we address…
Topology is an important determinant of the behavior of a great number of condensed-matter systems, but until recently has played a minor role in elasticity. We develop a theory for the deformations of a class of twisted non-Euclidean…
Recent studies of two-dimensional poly-disperse disc systems revealed a coordinated self-organisation of cell stresses and shapes, with certain distributions collapsing onto a master form for many processes, size distributions, friction…
We develop an unsupervised machine learning approach to classify disordered phases in a system of oppositely charged colloids. In this system, the interplay between Coulomb and van der Waals interactions leads to transitions in local…
Architecting mechanisms of damage in metamaterials by leveraging lattice topology and geometry poses a vital yet complex challenge, essential for engineering desirable mechanical responses. Of these metamaterials, Maxwell lattices, which…