软凝聚态物质
Chiral liquid crystals and chiral magnets host a wide variety of topological solitons described by closely related continuum theories, namely the Frank-Oseen and Dzyaloshinskii models. Exploiting this correspondence, we develop a unified…
Numerous problems in development, regeneration, and disease involve simultaneous evolution of both spatial organization and the internal state of the constituents in addition to local interactions and crowding. This motivates us to study a…
Active particles locally transduce energy into motion, leading to unusual and emergent behaviors. However, current synthetic particles lack sensing and adaptation mechanisms. Here, we demonstrate a novel regulation pathway, through the…
Anisotropy in granular materials arises from both the internal fabric and the directionality of the stress state, yet separating these effects experimentally remains challenging. This study develops a first-order linearisation of the…
Microbial swarming on mucosal surfaces reshapes microbial communities and influences mucosal healing and antibiotic tolerance. Yet even with time-lapse microscopy and deep learning, analyses of swarming colonies remain descriptive and…
We present a thermodynamically consistent model for chemically driven running drops on a solid substrate with reversible substrate adsorption of a wettability-changing chemical species. We consider drops confined to a vertical gap, thereby…
The transport of molecules for chemical reactions is critically important in various cellular biological processes. Despite thermal diffusion being prevalent in many biochemical processes, it is unreliable for any sort of directed transport…
We show that propagating switching fronts mediate directional state transmission and polarity selection in a passive many-body suspension. In confined trains of slipper-shaped deformable particles in Poiseuille flow, this behavior…
Millimeter-sized particles trapped at the surface of a liquid bath attract each other through the deformation of the liquid-air interface, a phenomenon known as "the Cheerios effect". We consider here a situation similar at first sight: the…
Many natural and industrial systems involve particle-laden interfaces. Because interfacial particles prevent the coalescence and coarsening of drops, they hold promise for various applications requiring stable emulsions. Despite their…
The phenomenon of salt creeping along a free surface remains only partially understood, particularly with respect to its dynamics. In this work, combining a theoretical model with controlled experiments, we identify three distinct kinetic…
Macroscopic active matter systems, such as bristle bots, provide a compelling platform for investigating nonequilibrium dynamics at highly visible scales. To fully leverage their accessibility, accurate mathematical models are needed to…
We investigate the dynamics of an inertial chiral active Brownian particle in the presence of a harmonic confinement. Through numerical simulation, we observe that when the harmonic frequency becomes comparable to the chiral frequency, the…
Diffusion of a solute along a channel is enhanced by hydrodynamic flow, a phenomenon known as Taylor dispersion. In microfluidic applications, the compliance of the channel boundaries modifies the hydrodynamic flow and thus solutal…
The linear viscoelastic response of flexible polymer solutions in the dilute and semidilute unentangled regimes is investigated using Brownian dynamics simulations. The relaxation modulus and dynamic moduli are computed over a wide range of…
This study presents a materials-design framework for low-voltage pressure-sensitive electroadhesives based on ion-containing bottlebrush polymers that combine the on-demand reversibility of traditional electroadhesives with the tunable…
The emergence of membranous compartments (protocells) with encapsulated genetic material was a crucial step life's origin and evolution. The hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life suggests that protocells could have formed in hot…
A plethora of natural and industrial shear-driven granular flows exhibit particle-size segregation. Its occurrence is commonly attributed to two primary mechanisms: kinetic sieving and squeeze expulsion. While kinetic sieving is relatively…
An important quantity in liquid state theory is the radial distribution function $g(r)$. It can be calculated within the framework of classical density functional theory in two very distinct ways. In the test-particle route, one fixes a…
Conical microfluidic channels filled with electrolytes exhibit volatile memristive behavior, offering a promising platform for energy-efficient, neuromorphic computing. Here, we integrate these iontronic channels as additional nonlinear…