软凝聚态物质
A symmetrically-buckled arch whose boundaries are clamped at an angle has two stable equilibria: an inverted and a natural state. When the distance between the clamps is increased (i.e. the confinement is decreased) the system snaps from…
The hydrodynamic interactions between a sedimenting microswimmer and a solid wall have ubiquitous biological and technological applications. A plethora of gravity-induced swimming dynamics near a planar no-slip wall provides a platform for…
Buckling in compression is the archetype of elastic instability: when compressed along its longest dimension, a thin structure such as a playing card will buckle out-of-plane accommodating the imposed compression without a significant…
Competing interactions stabilize exotic mesoscopic structures, yet the microscopic mechanisms by which they influence non-equilibrium processes leading to disordered states remain largely unexplored, despite their critical role in…
Active microparticles in confining potentials manifest complex and intriguing dynamical phenomena, as their activity competes with confinement. The steady-state position distributions of harmonically bound active Brownian particles (HBABPs)…
We evaluate the loss of stability of axially compressed slender and thick-walled tubes subject to a residual stress distribution. The nonlinear theory of elasticity, when used to analyze the underlying deformation, shows that the residual…
Many biological processes involve transport and organization of inclusions in thin fluid interfaces. A key aspect of these assemblies is the active dissipative stresses applied from the inclusions to the fluid interface, resulting in…
Transient size segregation of a bi-disperse granular mixture flowing over a periodic chute is studied using DEM simulations and theory. A recently developed particle force-based size segregation model has been shown to successfully predict…
We present experimental results in which a quasimonolayer of grains, shaped as equilateral triangular prisms, is vertically vibrated within circular and square confining cavities. The system exhibits a fluid phase characterized by sixfold…
Soft dielectric elastomers that can exhibit extremely large deformations under the action of an electric field enable applications such as soft robotics, biomedical devices, energy harvesting among others. A key impediment in the use of…
We review the theoretical aspects of determining linear rheology using passive microrheology from simulations under periodic boundary conditions (PBC). It is common to impose periodic boundary conditions when evaluating bulk properties by…
The Dean-Kawasaki (DK) equation, which is at the basis of stochastic density functional theory (SDFT), was proposed in the mid-nineties to describe the evolution of the density of interacting Brownian particles, which can represent a large…
In this study, we demonstrate that when a ferroelectric nematic is confined between two glass plates coated with ionic polymers, a modulated phase emerges in a narrow temperature range between the nematic and ferroelectric nematic phases.…
Activity-mediated unjamming of a confluent glassy system is crucial for several biological processes, such as embryogenesis and cancer metastasis. During these processes, the cells progressively change their junction properties,…
The precise control of complex reactions is critical for biological processes yet our inability to design for specific outcomes limits the development of synthetic analogues. Here, we leverage differentiable simulators to design nontrivial…
One of the central problems in epigenetics is how epigenetic modification patterns and chromatin structure are regulated in the cell nucleus. The polymer Potts model, a recently studied model of chromatins, is introduced with an offset in…
The measurement of interfacial mechanical or rheological properties in polymer blends is a challenging task, as well as providing a quantitative link between these properties and the interfacial nanostructure. Here, we perform a systematic…
The stretching of viscoelastic polymer solutions close to break-up can create attached drops on a filament, whose properties and dynamics are little understood. The stretching of capillary bridges and the consecutive filament, until its…
Swelling is a volumetric-growth process in which a porous material expands by spontaneous imbibition of additional pore fluid. Swelling is distinct from other growth processes in that it is inherently poromechanical: Local expansion of the…
A number of factors, such as, cell-cell interactions and self-propulsion of cells driven by cytoskeletal forces determine tissue morphologies and dynamics. To explore the interplay between these factors in controlling the dynamics at the…