软凝聚态物质
Springs can be found in many applications and biological systems, and when these are soft, they easily deform. At small scales, capillarity can induce a force leading to spring deformations when the elastocapillary number is small. We…
In direct ink writing (DIW), neighbouring filaments of yield-stress inks are deposited side-by-side and are expected to merge into smooth, mechanically robust structures. Unlike Newtonian filaments, coalescence can arrest in finite time,…
Liquids in nanoscale hydrophilic pores generate capillary pressures so large that they could theoretically climb kilometers against gravity. However, droplets on thin nanoporous layers form imbibition fronts stopping at millimeters or less…
We demonstrate the existence of a frequency band exhibiting acoustic transparency in 2D and 3D dense granular suspensions, enabling the transmission of a low-frequency ballistic wave excited by a high-frequency broadband ultrasound pulse.…
Liquid crystal mesophases of achiral molecules are normally achiral, yet in a few materials they spontaneously segregate and form right- and left-handed chiral domains. One mechanism that drives chiral segregation is molecular shape…
Stiff forces, which bind objects together or otherwise confine motion, are found widely in soft-matter systems - colloids with short range attractions, ligand-receptor contacts, particles in optical traps, fibres that resist stretching,…
The autonomous motion of liquid crystal oil droplets in micellar media arises from spontaneous breaking of time reversal symmetry via nonlinear coupling between Marangoni stresses and surfactant transport. While this phenomenon has been…
In pursuit of a colloidal analogue to quantum density functional theory (DFT) predictions of atomic crystal structures, we report a new, classical DFT that predicts the relative thermodynamic stability of colloidal crystals of hard, convex…
We investigate vapor-liquid phase separation of an active near critical Lennard-Jones fluid confined within a cylindrical pore using molecular dynamics simulations. Activity is introduced via Vicsek-type alignment interactions, enabling a…
Cyclic Voltammetry (CV) is the most commonly used method in electrochemistry to characterize electrochemical reactions, usually involving macroscopic electrodes. Here we demonstrate an optical CV technique called Opto-iontronic Microscopy,…
The ordering kinetics of standing cylinder-forming polystyrene-block-poly (methyl methacrylate) block copolymers (molecular weight: 39 kg/mol) close to the order-disorder transition is experimentally investigated following the temporal…
The complexity of biomolecular interactions necessitates advanced methodologies to accurately capture their behavior in solution. In this work, we focus on monoclonal antibodies and adopt a multi-scale coarse-graining strategy for their…
Filamentous bacteriophages fd are viral particles, highly monodisperse in size, that have been widely used as a model colloidal system for studying the self-assembly of rod-shaped particles as well as a versatile template in nanoscience. In…
Ion transport underlies the operation of biological ion channels and governs the performance of electrochemical energy-storage devices. A long-standing anomaly is that smaller alkali metal ions, such as Li$^+$, migrate more slowly in water…
Topology provides a unifying framework for understanding robust transport through protected edge states arising from nontrivial wavenumber topology. Extending these concepts to active matter, however, remains largely unexplored…
When a liquid droplet completely wets a hard substrate, its spreading dynamics follow Tanner's law, with the droplet radius growing as the one-tenth power of time. Here, we investigate how these dynamics change when silicone oil droplets…
Understanding how microorganisms navigate in complex environments is a central question in active matter and biological physics. Phototaxis - the ability to use light as a navigation cue - is a widespread strategy in motile microalgae to…
When liquids are cooled rapidly, they bypass crystallization and instead enter a supercooled state and then a glass state. Previous studies have shown that the static structure factors of high-temperature liquids, supercooled liquids, and…
Field induced assembly of reconfigurable structures with complex hierarchical configurations has recently become an area of intense research with the promise for exciting applications in programmable self-assembly and nano/microstructure…
Active Brownian particles, even without attractive and anisotropic inter-particle interactions, can form a high-density phase featuring structure-ordered domains as well as collective motion regions under thermal noise. However, the…