软凝聚态物质
We study a slender filament beating in a viscous fluid with novel curvature-dependent bending stiffness. Our numerical and experimental investigations reveal that such differential stiffness can sustain planar bending waves far along…
Electric field-induced splay of molecular orientation, called the Fr\'eedericksz transition, is a fundamental electro-optic phenomenon in nonpolar nematic liquid crystals. In a ferroelectric nematic NF with a spontaneous electric…
The elastic moduli of tissues are connected to their states of health and function. The epithelial monolayer is a simple, minimal, tissue model that is often used to gain understanding of mechanical behavior at the cellular or…
The supramolecular assembly of lipids into bilayer membranes is essential for cellular structure and function. However, the impact of lipid structural variations such as acyl chain length, degree of unsaturation, and headgroup type on…
One of the many measures of the non-equilibrium nature of a system is the existence of a non-zero steady state current which is especially relevant for many biological systems. To this end, we study the non-equilibrium dynamics of a…
The Peach-Koehler force between disclination lines was originally formulated in the study of crystalline solids, and has since been adopted to provide a notion of interactions between disclination lines in nematic liquid crystals. Here, we…
The creep behavior of an amorphous poly(etherimide) (PEI) polymer is investigated in the vicinity of its glass transition in a weakly non linear regime where the acceleration of the creep response is driven by local configurational…
Polymers play a crucial role in the development of engineering materials, with applications ranging from mechanical to biomedical fields. However, the limited polymerization processes constrain the variety of organic building blocks that…
This article investigates the effect of using isotropic and anisotropic plastic response functions in the analysis of the elastic-plastic response of unidirectional fibre composites on the meso-scale. Three model problems that use a…
Fr\'eedericksz transitions in nematic liquid crystals are re-examined with a focus on differences between systems with magnetic fields and those with electric fields. A magnetic field can be treated as uniform in a liquid-crystal medium;…
Molecular rotors form twisted conformations upon photoexcitation, with their fluorescent relaxation time serving as a measure of viscosity. They have been used to assess membrane viscosities but yield higher values compared to other…
We study interacting active Brownian particles (ABPs) with a space-dependent swim velocity via simulation and theory. We find that, although an equation of state exists, a mechanical equilibrium does not apply to ABPs in activity…
Lubrication flows between two solid surfaces can be found in a variety of biological and engineering settings. In many of these systems, the lubricant exhibits viscoelastic properties, which modify the associated lubrication forces. Here,…
Polymer matrix fiber composites often suffer from residual stresses due to differences in coefficients of thermal expansion between the fibers and resins, as well as contractile strain of the resins during curing. To address residual stress…
Chromonic liquid crystals are lyotropic nematic phases whose applications span from food to drug industries. It has recently been suggested that the elastic energy density governing the equilibrium distortions of these materials may be…
The mean square displacement (MSD) of intruders (tracer particles) immersed in a multicomponent granular mixture made up of smooth inelastic hard spheres in a homogeneous cooling state is explicitly computed. The multicomponent granular…
We are used to measure temperature with a thermometer and we know from everyday life that different types of thermometers measure the same temperature. This experience can be based on equilibrium thermodynamics, which explains the…
We propose a scar model to reproduce how double-strand breaks occur in the telomeric DNA damaged by the effect of the $\beta$-decay of tritium to helium. In this scar model, the two hydrogens bonded to the 5$^\prime$ carbon connecting the…
Non-reciprocal (NR) effective interactions violating Newton's third law occur in many biological systems, but can also be engineered in synthetic, colloidal systems. Recent research has shown that such NR interactions can have tremendous…
Due to its inherent intertwinement with irreversibility, entropy production is a prime observable to monitor in systems of active particles. In this numerical study, entropy production in the liquid, hexatic and solid phases of a…