软凝聚态物质
Cavitation in soft elastomers and adhesives is often viewed as an elastic instability, commonly tied to the study of incompressible solids. It is the first step prior to fibrillation and ultimate failure in adhesives. Building on the work…
Chiral active liquids exhibit unidirectional edge currents when confined to simple geometries, but the origin of this phenomenon has defied explanation. Starting from the microscopic equations of motion of a simple two-dimensional model, we…
Adding dynamic bonds in polymer networks enables reprocessing and recycling; however the full impact of reversible bonds on dynamic network mechanics remains unclear. We build model dynamic networks and observe substantial deviations from…
Some recent work pointed out the usefulness of taking a large-deviation perspective when trying to extract anything resembling a macroscopic order parameter from a computer simulation. In this paper we note that the end-to-end distance of…
We develop a general method for determining the effective interaction potential between two or more droplets suspended within a fluid phase. Our approach is based on classical density functional theory. Here, we apply the method to…
The control of the thermocapillary assembly of colloidal particle clusters is important for a variety of applications, including the creation of photonic crystals for microelectronics and optoelectronics, membrane formation for…
Living systems continuously transform matter and energy through the chemical processes that constitute their metabolism. The overall metabolic rate of an organism correlates positively with its body mass, however both the exact scaling…
Feedback control plays a central role in active matter, yet it is inevitably accompanied by noise and finite perception--action delays. This Perspective reviews recent advances on active systems with delayed interactions, showing how time…
The control of active colloidal particles via optical traps is a cornerstone for research of matter at the micron and nanometer scale. A central challenge in this domain is the derivation of optimal transport protocols that minimize the…
Deep in the Earth's crust, pressure exceeds one thousand times the atmospheric pressure. Water still flows under these conditions, but experiences dramatic changes in structure and fluidity. Using combined dynamic and inelastic light…
Chemical activity is known to affect phase coexistence and coarsening in liquid mixtures, most commonly through reaction-induced changes of intermolecular interactions. Here, we analyze a scenario in which chemical reactions regulate…
We present experiments on the collective dynamics of macroscopic photoactive self-propelled particles subjected to spatiotemporally varying excitation. The particles move within an arena divided into two regions with different illumination…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
With the ever-increasing digitization of society, the development of materials with low-power memory storage -similar to synapses- is becoming more relevant. The field of iontronic artificial synapses has gained traction, in particular with…
The phase diagram of self-propelled hard disk systems with Vicsek-type alignment interactions was investigated by event-driven molecular dynamics simulations. The model incorporates two competing order parameters: the polar order-disorder…
Free energies are fundamental quantities governing phase behavior and thermodynamic stability in polymer systems, yet their accurate computation often requires extensive simulations and post-processing techniques such as the Bennett…
The phase separation of purely-repulsive particles induced by self-propulsion is among the most well-studied non-equilibrium phase transitions. However, some notable features of this transition remain open questions, including the origin of…
Breakloose friction, the transient force peak at the onset of sliding, is often pronounced in nanoscale contacts but weak or absent in macroscopic systems. Although this behavior is commonly associated with rupture fronts and process-zone…
There is a recent interest in studying odd elasticity in soft solids. Current focus has been on simple solids. However, many soft solids are structured and can exhibit nematic elasticity or viscoelasticity. Here we generalize the concept of…
Epoxy polymers are widely used due to their multifunctional properties, but machine learning (ML) applications remain limited owing to their complex 3D molecular structure, multi-component nature, and lack of curated datasets. Existing ML…