软凝聚态物质
The ideal glass, a disordered system of particles with zero configurational entropy, cannot be realized through thermal processes. Nevertheless, we present a method for constructing ideal jammed packings of soft spheres, and thus the zero…
Experiments reveal that structural transitions in thin sheets are mediated by the passage of transient and stable mobile localized elastic excitations. These ``crumples'' or ``d-cones'' nucleate, propagate, interact, annihilate, and escape.…
Active adaptive matter has attracted considerable interest due to its rich, largely unexplained dynamics and its relevance to a wide range of synthetic and biological materials. An important subclass of such systems consists of active…
Understanding how the physical properties of a fluid influence bacterial behavior is essential for explaining how microorganisms interact with their environment and with animal hosts. Here, we examine how changes in fluid viscosity and…
Classical density functional theory (DFT) is the primary method for investigations of inhomogeneous fluids in external fields. It requires the excess Helmholtz free energy functional as input to an Euler-Lagrange equation for the one-body…
Controlling the size of droplets, for example in biological cells, is challenging because large droplets typically outcompete smaller droplets due to surface tension. This coarsening is generally accelerated by hydrodynamic effects, but…
The ability to optically trap and manipulate artificial microswimmers such as active Janus particles (JPs) provides a breakthrough in active matter research and applications. However, it presents significant challenges because of the…
The traditional Mpemba effect refers to an anomalous cooling phenomenon when an initial hotter system cools down faster than an initial warm system. Such counterintuitive behavior has been confirmed and explored across phase transitions in…
Dense arrays of soft hair-like structures protruding from surfaces in contact with fluids are ubiquitous in living systems. Fluid flows can easily deform these soft hairs which in turn impacts the flow properties. At the microscale, flows…
We develop a hydrodynamic description of self-generated electrolyte flow in capillaries whose bounding walls feature both non-uniform distributions of charge and non-uniform active ionic fluxes. The hydrodynamic velocity arising in such a…
Since its invention by Arthur Ashkin and colleagues at Bell Labs in the 1970s, optical micromanipulation, also known as optical tweezers or laser tweezers, has evolved remarkably to become one of the most convenient and versatile tools for…
Almost all observed square-triangle quasicrystals in soft-matter systems contain a large number of point-like defects, yet the role these defects play in stabilizing the quasicrystal phase remains poorly understood. In this work, we…
Variability of motility behavior in populations of microbiological agents is a ubiquitous phenomenon even in the case of genetically identical cells. Accordingly, passive objects introduced into such biological systems and driven by them…
Instabilities of fluid-fluid interfaces are ubiquitous in passive soft matter. Adding activity to the interface or either fluid can dramatically change the stability of the interface. Using experiment and theory, we investigate the…
This article deals with the existence and scaling of an energy cascade in steady granular liquid flows between the scale at which the system is forced and the scale at which it dissipates energy. In particular, we examine the possible…
Muscle contraction is a prototypical multiscale chemomechanical process in which ATP hydrolysis at the molecular level drives force generation and mechanical work at larger scales. A long-standing challenge is to connect microscopic…
The water-repellence properties of superhydrophobic surfaces make them promising for many applications. However, in some extreme environments, such as high humidities and low temperatures, condensation on the surface is inevitable, which…
I study via Langevin dynamics simulations two opposite cases of systems of particles that alternate their identity according to density dependent motility (DDM) rules and interact via a soft repulsive potential. In the correlated case,…
Acoustic metamaterials offer exceptional control over wave propagation, but their potential remains unfulfilled due to fabrication constraints. Conventional processes yield mostly rigid, planar structures, whereas soft-matter alternatives…
We study a single lattice polymer chain under a fixed end-to-end distance, incorporating both Domb--Joyce (DJ) soft-core self-repulsion between polymer segments and a local bending-energy cost. By decomposing the stiffness into energetic…