软凝聚态物质
We study the deformation and slip-through of a heavy elastic beam suspended above two point supports and subject to an increasing body force -- an idealized model of a fibre trapped in the pores of a filter as flow strength increases, for…
Crystalline or polycrystalline systems governed by odd elastic responses are known to exhibit complex dynamical behaviors involving self-propelled dynamics of topological defects with spontaneous self-rotation of chiral crystallites.…
Living organisms have developed advanced motion strategies for efficient space exploration, serving as inspiration for the movements of microrobots. These real-life strategies often involve anomalous dynamics displaying random movement…
The Taylor-Aris theory of shear diffusion predicts that the effective diffusivity of a tracer molecule in a sheared liquid is enhanced by a term quadratic in the shear rate. In sheared supercooled liquids, instead, the observed enhancement…
Lifshitz points (LPs) are multicritical points where ordered, disordered, and patterned phases meet. Originally studied in equilibrium magnetic systems, LPs have since been identified in soft matter and even cosmological settings. Their…
Microorganisms often encounter strong confinement and complex hydrodynamic flows while navigating their habitats. Combining finite-element methods and stochastic simulations, we study the interplay of active transport and heterogeneous…
In this work, we investigate the forces acting on a flexible fiber dragged through a granular bed. Using discrete element simulations, we observe that, after a sufficiently large displacement, the system reaches a steady state in which both…
Microstructurally arrested matter, from molecular glasses to soft glassy materials, can retain a memory of their thermal or mechanical (shear) histories. Their history-dependent and nonlinear microstructural recoveries have been studied…
This study explores the application of elongated particle interaction models, traditionally used in liquid crystal phase research, in the context of early bacterial biofilm development. Through computer simulations using an agent-based…
Monodisperse, purely repulsive, hard spheres (MPRHS) are an important model system for mechanistically exploring phase behavior in atomic systems and colloids. Since the 1940s, phase transitions in these systems have been obtained via…
Forcing hydrophilic fluids through hydrophobic porous solids is a recurrent industrial challenge. If the penetrating fluid is Newtonian, the imposed pressure has to overcome the capillary pressure at the fluid-air interface in a pore. The…
Natural active systems routinely reshape and reorganize their environments through sustained local interactions. Examples of decentralized collective construction are common in nature, e.g., many insects achieve large-scale constructions…
In this work, we study the rheological behavior of colloidal dispersion of charge-screened nanoparticles of silica suspended in aqueous media that exhibits soft solid-like consistency. We observe that the system shows various…
Using X-ray tomography, we experimentally investigate the structural evolution of packings composed of 3D-printed hexapod particles, each formed by three mutually orthogonal spherocylinders, during tap-induced compaction. We identify two…
Within a model where micrometer-size soft colloidal particles are viewed as liquid drops, we theoretically study the contact interaction between them. We compute the exact deformation energy across a broad range of indentations and for…
A central and extensively debated question in glass physics concerns whether a single, growing lengthscale fundamentally controls glassy dynamics, particularly in systems lacking obvious structural motifs like the Kob Andersen binary…
The rheology of dense granular shear flows is influenced by friction and particle shape. We investigate numerically the impact of non-spherical particle geometries under shear on packing fraction, stress ratios, velocity fluctuations, force…
Understanding the connection between structure, dynamics, and fragility, the rate at which the relaxation time grows with decreasing temperature, is central to unravelling the glass transition. Fragility is often associated with dynamic…
Classical density functional theory (cDFT) and dynamical density functional theory (DDFT) are modern statistical mechanical theories for modeling many-body colloidal systems at the one-body density level. The theories hinge on knowing the…
Synthetic copolymers and biopolymers, such as polypeptides and double-stranded DNA, often exhibit strong variations in bending stiffness along their contour, which can significantly impact conformational behavior at larger scales. To…