软凝聚态物质
Bacterial colonies can form a wide variety of shapes and structures based on ambient and internal conditions. To help understand the mechanisms that determine the structure of and the diversity within these colonies, various numerical…
The shapes of liquid polystyrene (PS) droplets on viscoelastic polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrates are investigated experimentally using atomic force microscopy for a range of droplet sizes and substrate elasticities. These shapes, which…
To further understand the complex behavior of swimming microorganisms, the spontaneous motion of nonliving matter provides essential insights. While substantial research has focused on quantitatively analyzing complex behavioral patterns,…
Active systems comprising micron-sized self-propelling units, also termed microswimmers, are promising candidates for the bottom-up assembly of small structures and reconfigurable materials. Here we leverage field-driven colloidal assembly…
The Random First Order Transition Theory (RFOT) predicts that transport proceeds by cooperative movement of particles in domains whose sizes increase as a liquid is compressed above a characteristic volume fraction, $\phi_d$. The rounded…
The directed migration of cells toward stiffer substrate regions or durotaxis is relevant to tissue development and tumor progression. Here, we introduce a phenomenological model for single cell durotaxis that incorporates both elastic…
Physics-based first-principles pressure-volume-temperature equations of state (EOS) exist for solids and gases but not for liquids due to the long-standing fundamental problems involved in liquid theory. Current EOS models that are…
The selection of parameters in the contact law for inter-particle interactions affects the results of simulations of flowing granular materials. The present study aims to understand the effect of the ratio of tangential to normal spring…
Mathematical modeling is a powerful tool in rheology, and we present pyRheo, an open-source package for Python designed to streamline the analysis of creep, stress relaxation, oscillation, and rotation tests. pyRheo contains a comprehensive…
Even though the Dissipative Particle Dynamics (DPD) has shown its worth in a variety of research areas, it has been rarely used for polymer dynamics, particularly in dilute and semi-dilute conditions and under imposed flow fields. For such…
The formation of coacervates through phase separation of oppositely charged polyelectrolytes (PEs) is critical for understanding biological condensates and developing responsive materials. Traditionally, coacervates are viewed as spherical…
The construction of coarse-grained descriptions of a system's kinetics is well established in biophysics. One prominent example is Markov state models in protein folding dynamics. In this paper, we develop a coarse-grained, discrete state…
We study the partitioning of motile bacteria in an aqueous two-phase mixture of dextran (DEX) and polyethylene glycol (PEG), which can phase separate into DEX-rich and PEG-rich phases. While non-motile bacteria partition exclusively into…
In active matter systems, non-Gaussian, exact scaling exponents have been claimed in a range of systems using perturbative renormalization group (RG) methods. This is unusual compared to equilibrium systems where non-Gaussian exponents can…
Recent advancements have demonstrated that fully Eulerian methods can effectively model frictionless contact between deformable solids. Unlike traditional Lagrangian approaches, which require contact detection and resolution algorithms, the…
The low frequency vibrational anomaly known as Boson peak (BP) have been studied extensively in various disordered systems, however its origin and theoretical description are still under debate. In this work, as one of the simplest model…
Motivated by the idea of using simple macroscopic examples to illustrate the physics of complex systems, we modify a historic experimental setup in which interacting floating magnets spontaneously self-assemble into ordered clusters. By…
We show that spontaneous density segregation in dense systems of aligning circle swimmers is a condensation phenomenon at odds with the phase separation scenarios usually observed in two-dimensional active matter. The condensates, which…
How condensed-matter simulations depend on the number of molecules being simulated ($N$) is sometimes itself a valuable piece of information. Liquid crystals provide a case in point. Light scattering and $2d$-IR experiments on…
Miura-Ori, a celebrated origami pattern that facilitates functionality in matter, has found multiple applications in the field of mechanical metamaterials. Modifications of Miura-Ori pattern can produce curved configurations during folding,…