软凝聚态物质
A body immersed in a nematic liquid crystal disturbs the fluid's preferred molecular configuration and increases its stored elastic energy. In an active nematic, the fluid components also generate a stress in the bulk fluid. By introducing…
The traditional goal of inverse self-assembly is to design interactions that drive particles toward a desired target structure. However, achieving successful self-assembly also requires tuning the thermodynamic conditions under which the…
The addition of a small quantity of flexible fibers in a granular material is an efficient technique to increase the yield stress of the material. While the influence of fiber addition on the mechanical strength of granular media has been…
In this work, we investigate the topological properties of knotted defects in smectic liquid crystals. Our story begins with screw dislocations, whose radial surface structure can be smoothly accommodated on $S^3$ for fibred knots by using…
In densely-packed two-dimensional systems of growing cells, such as rod-shaped bacteria, a number of experimental and numerical studies report distinct patterns of nematic orientational order in the presence of confinement. So far, these…
Line fields on surfaces are a means to describe the nematic order that may pattern them. The least distorted nematic fields are called uniform, but they can only exist on surfaces with negative constant Gaussian curvature. To identify the…
Although coarse-grained models have been widely used to explain exotic phenomena in complex fluids, such as droplet formation in living cells, these conventional approaches often fail to capture the intricate microscopic degrees of freedom…
When amorphous molecular powders are exposed to high humidity levels or temperatures, the particle viscosity increases due to plasticization, promoting the formation of sinter bridges between pairs of particles in contact. Over time, these…
Quasicrystals are materials that exhibit long-range order without translational periodicity. In soft matter, the most commonly observed quasicrystal has 12-fold symmetry and consists of tilings made out of squares and triangles.…
Surface effects could play a dominant role in modifying the natural liquid order. In some cases, the effects of the surface interactions can propagate inwards, and even can interfere with a similar propagation from opposite surfaces. This…
The strength of granular materials is highly dependent on grain connectivity (fabric), force transmission, and frictional mobilization at the particle scale. Furthermore, these bulk properties are strongly dependent on the geometry and…
The elastic modulus $G$ of a polymer network depends notably on parameters such as the initial concentration of the monomers before the synthesis ($\rho_0$), the density of the cross-linker, or the topology of the network. Understanding how…
We employ molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the domain morphology and growth kinetics of a vapor-liquid system embedded within a complex porous medium. By systematically varying the pore structure, we analyze the scaling…
Understanding transport subject to molecular-scale confinement is key to advancing nanofluidics, yet classical hydrodynamic laws often fail at these scales. Here, we study a model system: transport of toluene as a solvent and small…
Amorphous materials driven away from equilibrium display a diverse repertoire of complex, history-dependent behaviors. One striking feature is a failure to return to equilibrium after an abrupt change in otherwise static external…
The investigation of water's glass transition and a possible liquid-liquid transition within its supercooled state is hampered by its inevitable crystallization in a temperature range, termed "no-man's land". Here we report…
Elastic MicroPhase Separation (EMPS) provides a simple route to create soft materials with homogeneous microstructures by leveraging the supersaturation of crosslinked polymer networks with liquids. At low supersaturation, network…
Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and are used extensively in daily life and in industry. The modeling of these materials remains challenging; therefore, finding models with acceptable predictive accuracy that at the same time…
We conducted a comprehensive numerical investigation of the energy landscape of the Thomson problem for systems up to $N=150$. Our results show the number of distinct configurations grows exponentially with $N$, but significantly faster…
This work extends the classical dumbbell (two-bead) model of polymer chains to a more detailed multi-bead representation, where each polymer chain consists of $N$ beads connected by $N-1$ springs. We develop a thermodynamically consistent…