相关论文: Microscopic Picture of Cooperative Processes in Re…

The transition of a fluid to a rigid glass upon cooling is a common route of transformation from liquid to solid that embodies the most poorly understood features of both phases1,2,3. From the liquid perspective, the puzzle is to understand…

Using the theory of elasticity of polymer gels we show that large-scale cross-link density patterns written into the structure of the network in the melt state, can be revealed upon swelling by monitoring the monomer density patterns. We…

The consolidation of suspended particulate matter under external forces such as pressure or gravity is of widespread interest. In this work, we derive a constitutive relation to describe the deformation of a {\it two-dimensional} strongly…

The elastic properties of a soft matter material can be greatly altered by the presence of solid inclusions whose microscopic properties, such as their size and interactions, can have a dramatic effect. In order to shed light on these…

The macroscopic mechanical properties of densely packed coagulated colloidal particle gels strongly depend on the local arrangement of the powder particles on length scales of a few particle diameters. Heterogeneous microstructures exhibit…

Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…

Rigidity percolation (RP) occurs when mechanical stability emerges in disordered networks as constraints or components are added. Here we discuss RP with structural correlations, an effect ignored in classical theories albeit relevant to…

Many biological tissues feature a heterogeneous network of fibers whose tensile and bending rigidity contribute substantially to these tissues' elastic properties. Rigidity percolation has emerged as a important paradigm for relating these…

This study proposes a coherent scenario of the formation of permanent shear bands in the flow of yield stress materials. It is a well accepted point of view that flow in disordered media is occurring via local plastic events, corresponding…

We report event-driven molecular dynamics simulations of the irreversible gelation of hard ellipsoids of revolution containing several associating groups, characterizing how the cluster size distribution evolves as a function of the extent…

We use confocal microscopy to image colloidal gels formed from highly polydisperse particles. We suspend our polydisperse particles in a density matched solvent, and let the particles spontaneously aggregate through the van der Waals force.…

Thermoresponsive microgels are polymeric colloidal networks that can change their size in response to a temperature variation. This peculiar feature is driven by the nature of the solvent-polymer interactions, which triggers the so-called…

Colloidal systems find important applications ranging from fabrication of photonic crystals to direct probing of phenomena typically encountered in atomic crystals and glasses. New applications - such as nanoantennas, plasmonic sensors, and…

Suspensions of attractive particles form space-spanning networks that endow the suspension with solid-like behavior at rest. The microstructure of these colloidal gels depends sensitively on the shear history and on the path followed across…

Molecular-motor generated active stresses drive the cytoskeleton away from equilibrium, endowing it with tunable mechanical properties that are essential for diverse functions such as cell division and motility[1-5]. Designing analogous…

Using molecular dynamics computer simulations we investigate the structural and dynamical properties of a simple model for a colloidal gel at low volume fraction. We find that at low T the system is forming an open percolating cluster,…

We study a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to investigate its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…

We discuss a class of models for particulate gels in which the particle contacts are described by an effective interaction combining a two-body attraction and a three-body angular repulsion. Using molecular dynamics, we show how varying the…

We derive a multiphysics model that accounts for network elasticity with spontaneous strains, swelling and nematic interactions in liquid crystal gels (LCGs). We discuss the coupling among the various physical mechanisms, with particular…

Using computer simulations, we identify the mechanisms causing aggregation and structural arrest of colloidal suspensions interacting with a short-ranged attraction at moderate and high densities. Two different non-ergodicity transitions…