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Electroadhesion for soft adhesive pads and robotics: theory and numerical results: Soft adhesive pads are needed for many robotics applications, and one approach is based on electroadhesion. Here we present a general analytic model and numerical results for electroadhesion for soft solids with arbitrary time-dependen...
cond-mat_soft
Charge-induced conformational changes of dendrimers: We study the effect of chargeable monomers on the conformation of dendrimers of low generation by computer simulations, employing bare Coulomb interactions. The presence of the latter leads to an increase in size of the dendrimer due to a combined effect of electrost...
cond-mat_soft
Large frequency range of negligible transmission in 1D photonic quantum well structures: We show that it is possible to enlarge the range of low transmission in 1D photonic crystals by using photonic quantum well structures. If a defect is introduced in the photonic quantum well structures, defect modes with a very h...
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Dielectric behaviors of corrugated membranes: We have employed our recently developed Green's function formalism to study the dielectric behavior of a model membrane, formed by two periodic interfaces separating two media of different dielectric constants. The Maxwell's equations are converted into a surface integral e...
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The effect of attractions on the local structure of liquids and colloidal fluids: We revisit the role of attractions in liquids and apply these concepts to colloidal suspensions. Two means are used to investigate the structure; the pair correlation function and a recently developed topological method. The latter iden...
cond-mat_soft
A Knowledge-driven Physics-Informed Neural Network model; Pyrolysis and Ablation of Polymers: In aerospace applications, multiple safety regulations were introduced to address associated with pyrolysis. Predictive modeling of pyrolysis is a challenging task since multiple thermo-chemo-mechanical laws need to be concu...
cond-mat_soft
A Thermodynamic Model for Receptor Clustering: Intracellular signaling often arises from ligand-induced oligomerization of cell surface receptors. This oligomerization or clustering process is fundamentally a cooperative behavior between near-neighbor receptor molecules; the properties of this cooperative process clear...
cond-mat_soft
Exactly solvable model for self-assembly of hard core - soft shell particles at interfaces: A lattice model with soft repulsion followed by attraction is developed for a monolayer of hybrid core-shell particles self-assembling at an interface. The model is solved exactly in one dimension. One, two or three periodic s...
cond-mat_soft
Spreading of Fluids on Solids Under Pressure: Effect of Slip: Spreading of different types of fluid on substrates under an impressed force is an interesting problem. Here we study spreading of four fluids, having different hydrophilicity and viscosity on two substrates - glass and perspex, under an external force. The ...
cond-mat_soft
Adhesion of membranes with competing specific and generic interactions: Biomimetic membranes in contact with a planar substrate or a second membrane are studied theoretically. The membranes contain specific adhesion molecules (stickers) which are attracted by the second surface. In the absence of stickers, the trans--i...
cond-mat_soft
Chiral Twisting of a Smectic-A Liquid Crystal: Chiral twisting of the molecular orientation within the layer of a smectic-A liquid crystal has been investigated using circular dichroism spectroscopy. The results indicate that a rotation of the layers away from the alignment direction is induced by the surface electrocl...
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Quantification of plasticity via particle dynamics above and below yield in a 2D jammed suspension: Failure of amorphous materials is characterized by the emergence of dissipation. The connection between particle dynamics, dissipation, and overall material rheology, however, has still not been elucidated. Here, we ta...
cond-mat_soft
Computational Study of Mechanochemical Activation in Nanostructured Triblock Copolymers: Force-driven chemical reactions have emerged as an attractive platform for diverse applications in polymeric materials. However, the network topologies necessary for efficiently transducing macroscopic forces to the molecular sca...
cond-mat_soft
Gel rupture in a dynamic environment: Hydrogels have had a profound impact in the fields of tissue engineering, drug delivery, and materials science as a whole. Due to the network architecture of these materials, imbibement with water often results in uniform swelling and isotropic expansion which scales with the degre...
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Decoupling of dipolar and hydrophobic motions in biological membranes: Cells use homeostatic mechanisms to maintain an optimal composition of distinct types of phospholipids in cellular membranes. The hydrophilic dipolar layer at the membrane interface, composed of phospholipid headgroups, regulates the interactions be...
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Chiral active matter: microscopic `torque dipoles' have more than one hydrodynamic description: Many biological systems, such as bacterial suspensions and actomyosin networks, form polar liquid crystals. These systems are `active' or far-from-equilibrium, due to local forcing of the solvent by the constituent particl...
cond-mat_soft
Non-local kinetic theory of inhomogeneous liquid mixtures: In this work we investigate the dynamical properties of a mixture of mutually interacting spherical molecules of different masses and sizes. From an analysis of the microscopic laws governing the motion of the molecules we derive a set of non-local self-consist...
cond-mat_soft
Mechanical rejuvenation and over-aging in the soft glassy rheology model: Mechanical rejuvenation and over-aging of glasses is investigated through stochastic simulations of the soft glassy rheology (SGR) model. Strain- and stress-controlled deformation cycles for a wide range of loading conditions are analyzed and com...
cond-mat_soft
Network effects lead to self-organization in metabolic cycles of self-repelling catalysts: Mixtures of particles that interact through phoretic effects are known to aggregate if they belong to species that exhibit attractive self-interactions. We study self-organization in a model metabolic cycle composed of three sp...
cond-mat_soft
Anti-Diffusion in an Algae-Bacteria Microcosm: Photosynthesis, Chemotaxis, and Expulsion: In Nature there are significant relationships known between microorganisms from two kingdoms of life, as in the supply of vitamin B$_{12}$ by bacteria to algae. Such interactions motivate general investigations into the spatio-t...
cond-mat_soft
Computational Study of Mechanochemical Activation in Nanostructured Triblock Copolymers: Force-driven chemical reactions have emerged as an attractive platform for diverse applications in polymeric materials. However, the network topologies necessary for efficiently transducing macroscopic forces to the molecular sca...
cond-mat_soft
Diffusion of an Inhomogeneous Vortex Tangle: The spatial diffusion of an inhomogeneous vortex tangle is studied numerically with the vortex filament model. A localized initial tangle is prepared by applying a counterflow, and the tangle is allowed to diffuse freely after the counterflow is turned off. Comparison with t...
cond-mat_soft
Electrochemically controlled polymeric device: a memristor (and more) found two years ago: We report the fabrication and properties of a polymeric memristor, i.e. an electronic element with memory of its previous history. We show how this element can be viewed as a functional analog of a synaptic junction and how it ...
cond-mat_soft
Mixtures of Hard Ellipsoids and Spheres: Stability of the Nematic Phase: The stability of liquid crystal phases in presence of small amount of non-mesogenic impurities is of general interest for a large spectrum of technological applications and in the theories of binary mixtures. Starting from the known phase diagram ...
cond-mat_soft
Effective mass overshoot in single degree of freedom mechanical systems with a particle damper: We study the response of a single degree of freedom mechanical system composed of a primary mass, M, a linear spring, a viscous damper and a particle damper. The particle damper consists in a prismatic enclosure of variabl...
cond-mat_soft
Two-Time Correlations for Probing the Aging Dynamics of Jammed Colloids: We present results for the aging dynamics of a jammed 2D colloidal system obtained with molecular dynamics simulations. We performed extensive simulations to gather detailed statistics about rare rearrangement events. With a simple criterion for i...
cond-mat_soft
Colloidal supported lipid bilayers for self-assembly: The use of colloidal supported lipid bilayers (CSLBs) has recently been extended to create colloidal joints, that - in analogy to their macroscopic counterparts - can flexibly connect colloidal particles. These novel elements enable the assembly of structures with i...
cond-mat_soft
Preliminary experiments demonstrating a "directed" Maxwell's granular demon: In this paper, we design a system of two symmetrical containers communicated by an aperture, in which a granular gas of glass spheres is created by shaking laterally the whole system in a planetary mill. If the aperture consists in a symmetr...
cond-mat_soft
Nonlinear dynamics and rheology of active fluids: simulations in two dimensions: We report simulations of a continuum model for (apolar, flow aligning) active fluids in two dimensions. Both free and anchored boundary conditions are considered, at parallel confining walls that are either static or moving at fixed rela...
cond-mat_soft
Two-dimensional skyrmions and other solitonic structures in confinement-frustrated chiral nematics: We explore spatially localized solitonic configurations of a director field, generated using optical realignment and laser-induced heating, in frustrated chiral nematic liquid crystals confined between substrates with ...
cond-mat_soft
Non-Equilibrium in Adsorbed Polymer Layers: High molecular weight polymer solutions have a powerful tendency to deposit adsorbed layers when exposed to even mildly attractive surfaces. The equilibrium properties of these dense interfacial layers have been extensively studied theoretically. A large body of experimental ...
cond-mat_soft
Thermomechanics of DNA: A theory for thermomechanical behavior of homogeneous DNA at thermal equilibrium predicts critical temperatures for denaturation under torque and stretch, phase diagrams for stable B--DNA, supercoiling, optimally stable torque, and the overstretching transition as force-induced DNA melting. Agre...
cond-mat_soft
How roughness affects the depletion mechanism: We develop a simple model, in the spirit of the Asakura-Oosawa theory, able to describe the effects of surface roughness on the depletion potential as a function of a small set of parameters. The resulting explicit expressions are easily computed, without free parameters, ...
cond-mat_soft
Effect of topology on dynamics of knots in polymers under tension: We use computer simulations to compare the dynamical behaviour of torus and even-twist knots in polymers under tension. The knots diffuse through a mechanism similar to reptation. Their friction coefficients grow linearly with average knot length for bo...
cond-mat_soft
Stress correlations in glasses: We rigorously establish that, in disordered three-dimensional (3D) isotropic solids, the stress autocorrelation function presents anisotropic terms that decay as $1/r^3$ at long-range, with $r$ the distance, as soon as either pressure or shear stress fluctuations are normal. By normal, w...
cond-mat_soft
A Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook-like Model Kinetic Equation for a Granular Gas of Inelastic Rough Hard Spheres: The Boltzmann collision operator for a dilute granular gas of inelastic rough hard spheres is much more intricate than its counterpart for inelastic smooth spheres. Now the one-body distribution function depends no...
cond-mat_soft
The cage effect in systems of hard spheres: The cage effect is generally invoked when discussing the delay in the decay of time correlation functions of dense fluids. In an attempt to examine the role of caging more closely we consider the spread of the displacement distributions of Brownian particles. These distributi...
cond-mat_soft
Likely striping in stochastic nematic elastomers: For monodomain nematic elastomers, we construct generalised elastic-nematic constitutive models combining purely elastic and neoclassical-type strain-energy densities. Inspired by recent developments in stochastic elasticity, we extend these models to stochastic-elastic...
cond-mat_soft
Light-Induced Manipulation of Passive and Active Microparticles: We consider sedimented at a solid wall particles that are immersed in water containing small additives of photosensitive ionic surfactants. It is shown that illumination with an appropriate wavelength, a beam intensity profile, shape and size could lead t...
cond-mat_soft
Effect of Branching on Phase Behaviors of ABC Triblock Copolymers in Nonfrustrated Systems: The phase behavior of linear dendritic triblock copolymer melts(AB2C4) is studied by self-consistent-field theory (SCFT) in order to find the effects of branching on the phase behavior of ABC linear triblock copolymer melts. W...
cond-mat_soft
Competition between Born solvation, dielectric exclusion, and Coulomb attraction in spherical nanopores: The recent measurement of a very low dielectric constant, $\epsilon$, of water confined in nanometric slit pores leads us to reconsider the physical basis of ion partitioning into nanopores. For confined ions in c...
cond-mat_soft
Aging of CKN: Modulus versus conductivity analysis: It was recently reported that the electrical modulus peaks narrows upon annealing of the ionic system CKN [Paluch et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 015702 (2013)], which was interpreted as providing evidence of dynamic heterogeneity of this glass-forming liquid. An analys...
cond-mat_soft
Force-induced rupture of a DNA duplex: The rupture of double-stranded DNA under stress is a key process in biophysics and nanotechnology. In this article we consider the shear-induced rupture of short DNA duplexes, a system that has been given new importance by recently designed force sensors and nanotechnological devi...
cond-mat_soft
Elastic instabilities in a layered cerebral cortex: A revised axonal tension model for cortex folding: We model the elasticity of the cerebral cortex as a layered material with bending energy along the layers and elastic energy between them in both planar and polar geometries. The cortex is also subjected to axons pu...
cond-mat_soft
Escherichia coli as a model active colloid: a practical introduction: The flagellated bacterium Escherichia coli is increasingly used experimentally as a self-propelled swimmer. To obtain meaningful, quantitative results that are comparable between different laboratories, reproducible protocols are needed to control, `...
cond-mat_soft
Defect turbulence in a dense suspension of polar, active swimmers: We study the effects of inertia in dense suspensions of polar swimmers. The hydrodynamic velocity field and the polar order parameter field describe the dynamics of the suspension. We show that a dimensionless parameter $R$ (ratio of the swimmer self-ad...
cond-mat_soft
Isotropic-nematic interfacial tension of hard and soft rods: application of advanced grand canonical biased sampling techniques: Coexistence between the isotropic and the nematic phase in suspensions of rods is studied using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations with a bias on the nematic order parameter. The biasi...
cond-mat_soft
Modelling Polymer Self Diffusion: An Alternative Model to Reptation: Herein an alternative model to reptation to describe concentrated polymer dynamics is developed. The model assumes that the chains act as blobs that are able to diffuse past each other in a compressed state. Allowing that the local viscosity experienc...
cond-mat_soft
Strongly inelastic granular gases: The expansion of the velocity distribution function for the homogeneous cooling state (HCS) in a Sonine polynomial series around a Maxwellian is shown to be divergent, though Borel resummable. A convergent expansion for the HCS has been devised and employed to obtain the HCS velocity ...
cond-mat_soft
Rain water transport and storage in a model sandy soil with hydrogel particle additives: We study rain water infiltration and drainage in a dry model sandy soil with superabsorbent hydrogel particle additives by measuring the mass of retained water for non-ponding rainfall using a self-built 3D laboratory set-up. In ...
cond-mat_soft
Role of rotational inertia for collective phenomena in active matter: We investigate the effect of rotational inertia on the collective phenomena of underdamped active systems and show that the increase of the moment of inertia of each particle favors non-equilibrium phase coexistence, known as motility induced phase s...
cond-mat_soft
Tension dynamics in semiflexible polymers. Part II: Scaling solutions and applications: In Part I of this contribution, a systematic coarse-grained description of the dynamics of a weakly-bending semiflexible polymer was developed. Here, we discuss analytical solutions of the established deterministic partial integro...
cond-mat_soft
Flexible polymer confined inside a cone-shaped nano-channel: Nano-scale confinement of polymer in cone-shaped geometries occurs in many experimental situations. A flexible polymer confined in a cone-shaped nano-channel is studied theoretically and using molecular dynamics simulations. Distribution of the monomers insid...
cond-mat_soft
Simultaneous concentration and velocity maps in particle suspensions under shear from rheo-ultrasonic imaging: We extend a previously developed ultrafast ultrasonic technique [Gallot et al., Rev. Sci. Instrum. 84, 045107 (2013)] to concentration field measurements in non-Brownian particle suspensions under shear. The...
cond-mat_soft
Polymer translocation out of confined environments: We consider the dynamics of polymer translocation out of confined environments. Analytic scaling arguments lead to the prediction that the translocation time scales like $\tau\sim N^{\beta+\nu_{2D}}R^{1+(1-\nu_{2D})/\nu}$ for translocation out of a planar confinement ...
cond-mat_soft
Landau theory of bending-to-stretching transition: Transition from bending-dominated to stretching-dominated elastic response in semi-flexible fibrous networks plays an important role in the mechanical behavior of cells and tissues. It is induced by changes in network connectivity and relies on construction of new cros...
cond-mat_soft
The vortex-driven dynamics of droplets within droplets: Understanding the fluid-structure interaction is crucial for an optimal design and manufacturing of soft mesoscale materials. Multi-core emulsions are a class of soft fluids assembled from cluster configurations of deformable oil-water double droplets (cores), oft...
cond-mat_soft
Absence of Dipole Glass Transition for Randomly Dilute Classical Ising Dipoles: Dilute dipolar systems in three dimensions are expected to undergo a spin glass transition as the temperature decreases. Contrary to this, we find from Wang-Landau Monte Carlo simulations that at low concentrations $x$, dipoles randomly p...
cond-mat_soft
Self-assembled multi-layer simple cubic photonic crystals of oppositely charged colloids in confinement: Designing and fabricating self-assembled open colloidal crystals have become one major direction in soft matter community because of many promising applications associated with open colloidal crystals. However, mo...
cond-mat_soft
Visualizing the strain evolution during the indentation of colloidal glasses: We use an analogue of nanoindentation on a colloidal glass to elucidate the incipient plastic deformation of glasses. By tracking the motion of the individual particles in three dimensions, we visualize the strain field and glass structure ...
cond-mat_soft
Drag Law of Two Dimensional Granular Fluids: The drag force law acting on a moving circular disk in a two-dimensional granular medium is analyzed based on the discrete element method (DEM). It is remarkable that the drag force on the moving disk in moderate dense and pure two-dimensional granular medium can be well rep...
cond-mat_soft
Positronium-positronium interaction: Resonance, scattering length, and Bose-Einstein condensation: The low-energy scattering of ortho positronium (Ps) by ortho Ps has been studied in a full quantum mechanical coupled-channel approach. In the singlet channel (total spin $s_T=0$) we find S- and P-wave resonances at 3.3...
cond-mat_soft
Layering and position-dependent diffusive dynamics of confined fluids: We study the diffusive dynamics of a hard-sphere fluid confined between parallel smooth hard walls. The position-dependent diffusion coefficient normal to the walls is larger in regions of high local packing density. High density regions also have t...
cond-mat_soft
Josephson Current Flowing in Cyclically Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensates: The Josephson effect in cyclically coupled Bose-Einstein condensates is studied theoretically. We analyze the simultaneous Gross-Pitaevskii equations with coupling terms between adjacent condensates. Depending on the initial relative phases be...
cond-mat_soft
Comment on "Minimal size of a barchan dune": It is now an accepted fact that the size at which dunes form from a flat sand bed as well as their `minimal size' scales on the flux saturation length. This length is by definition the relaxation length of the slowest mode toward equilibrium transport. The model presented by...
cond-mat_soft
Simulating structured fluids with tensorial viscoelasticity: We consider an immersed elastic body that is actively driven through a structured fluid by a motor or an external force. The behavior of such a system generally cannot be solved analytically, necessitating the use of numerical methods. However, current numeri...
cond-mat_soft
Scaling in rupture of polymer chains: We consider the rupture dynamics of a homopolymer chain pulled at one end at a constant loading rate r. Compared to single bond breaking, the existence of the chain introduces two new aspects into rupture dynamics: the non-Markovian aspect in the barrier crossing and the slow-down ...
cond-mat_soft
Photocontrol of Protein Conformation in a Langmuir Monolayer: We report a method to control the conformation of a weak polyampholyte (the protein $\beta$-casein) in Langmuir monolayers by light, even though the protein is not photosensitive. Our approach is to couple the monolayer state to a photochemical reaction exci...
cond-mat_soft
Effect of shape anisotropy on the phase diagram of the Gay-Berne fluid: We have used the density functional theory to study the effect of molecular elongation on the isotropic-nematic, isotropic-smectic A and nematic-smectic A phase transitions of a fluid of molecules interacting via the Gay-Berne intermolecular potent...
cond-mat_soft
Nonlinear modes disentangle glassy and Goldstone modes in structural glasses: One outstanding problem in the physics of glassy solids is understanding the statistics and properties of the low-energy excitations that stem from the disorder that characterizes these systems' microstructure. In this work we introduce a f...
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Bond formation and slow heterogeneous dynamics in adhesive spheres with long--ranged repulsion: Quantitative test of Mode Coupling Theory: A colloidal system of spheres interacting with both a deep and narrow attractive potential and a shallow long-ranged barrier exhibits a prepeak in the static structure factor. Thi...
cond-mat_soft
Transformation between elastic dipoles, quadrupoles, octupoles and hexadecapoles driven by surfactant self-assembly in nematic emulsion: Emulsions comprising isotropic fluid drops within a nematic host are of interest for applications ranging from biodetection to smart windows, which rely on changes of molecular alig...
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Equilibrating temperature-like variables in jammed granular subsystems: Although jammed granular systems are athermal, several thermodynamic-like descriptions have been proposed which make quantitative predictions about the distribution of volume and stress within a system and provide a corresponding temperature-like v...
cond-mat_soft
Magnetization of polydisperse colloidal ferrofluids: Effect of magnetostriction: We exploit magnetostriction in polydisperse ferrofluids in order to generate nonlinear responses, and apply a thermodynamical method to derive the desired nonlinear magnetic susceptibility. For an ideal gas, this method has been demonstr...
cond-mat_soft
Conformation of a Polyelectrolyte Complexed to a Like-Charged Colloid: We report results from a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation on the conformations of a long flexible polyelectrolyte complexed to a charged sphere, \textit{both negatively charged}, in the presence of neutralizing counterions in the strong Coulomb co...
cond-mat_soft
Reaction Kinetics in Polymer Melts: We study the reaction kinetics of end-functionalized polymer chains dispersed in an unreactive polymer melt. Starting from an infinite hierarchy of coupled equations for many-chain correlation functions, a closed equation is derived for the 2nd order rate constant $k$ after postulati...
cond-mat_soft
Optimized Large Hyperuniform Binary Colloidal Suspensions in Two Dimensions: The creation of disordered hyperuniform materials with potentially extraordinary optical properties requires a capacity to synthesize large samples that are effectively hyperuniform down to the nanoscale. Motivated by this challenge, we prop...
cond-mat_soft
Role of reversibility in viral capsid growth: A paradigm for self-assembly: Self-assembly at submicroscopic scales is an important but little understood phenomenon. A prominent example is virus capsid growth, whose underlying behavior can be modeled using simple particles that assemble into polyhedral shells. Molecul...
cond-mat_soft
Martini coarse-grained model for clay-polymer nanocomposites: We have developed a coarse-grained (CG) model of a polymer-clay system consisting of organically modified montmorillonite nanoclay as the nanoparticle in accordance with the MARTINI forcefield. We have used mechanical properties and cleavage free energy of c...
cond-mat_soft
Thermodynamic consistency between the energy and virial routes in the mean spherical approximation for soft potentials: It is proven that, for any soft potential characterized by a finite Fourier transform $\widetilde{\phi}(k)$, the virial and energy thermodynamic routes are equivalent for approximations such that th...
cond-mat_soft
Wetting, Spreading, and Adsorption on Randomly Rough Surfaces: The wetting properties of solid substrates with customary (i.e., macroscopic) random roughness are considered as a function of the microscopic contact angle of the wetting liquid and its partial pressure in the surrounding gas phase. Analytic expressions ar...
cond-mat_soft
Transitional cylindrical swirling flow in presence of a flat free surface: This article is devoted to the study of an incompressible viscous flow of a fluid partly enclosed in a cylindrical container with an open top surface and driven by the constant rotation of the bottom wall. Such type of flows belongs to a group...
cond-mat_soft
Guiding microscale swimmers using teardrop-shaped posts: The swimming direction of biological or artificial microscale swimmers tends to be randomised over long time-scales by thermal fluctuations. Bacteria use various strategies to bias swimming behaviour and achieve directed motion against a flow, maintain alignment ...
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Nucleation of liquid droplets in a fluid with competing interactions: Using a simple density functional theory (DFT) we determine the height of the free energy barrier for forming a droplet of the liquid phase from the metastable gas phase for a model colloidal fluid exhibiting competing interactions. The pair potentia...
cond-mat_soft
Heterogeneities and Topological Defects in Two-Dimensional Pinned Liquids: We simulate a model of repulsively interacting colloids on a commensurate two-dimensional triangular pinning substrate where the amount of heterogeneous motion that appears at melting can be controlled systematically by turning off a fraction ...
cond-mat_soft
Interference of a thermal Tonks gas on a ring: A nonzero temperature generalization of the Fermi-Bose mapping theorem is used to study the exact quantum statistical dynamics of a one-dimensional gas of impenetrable bosons on a ring. We investigate the interference produced when an initially trapped gas localized on one...
cond-mat_soft
Granular Dynamics during Impact: We study the impact of a projectile onto a bed of 3 mm grains immersed in an index-matched fluid. Specifically, we vary the amount of prestrain on the sample, strengthening the force chains within the system. We find this affects only the prefactor of linear depth-dependent term in the ...
cond-mat_soft
The Boson Peak and Disorder in Hard Sphere Colloidal Systems: The Boson peak is believed to be the key to the fundamental understanding of the anomalous thermodynamic properties of glasses, notably the anomalous peak in the heat capacity at low temperatures; it is believed to be due to an excess of low frequency vibrat...
cond-mat_soft
Vector Formalism for Active Nematics in Two Dimensions: Specific features of two-dimensional nematodynamics give rise to shortfalls of the tensor representation of the nematic order parameter commonly used in computations, especially in theory of active matter. The alternative representation in terms of the vector orde...
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Universality in Driven and Equilibrium Hard Sphere Liquid Dynamics: We demonstrate that the time evolution of the van Hove dynamical pair correlation function is governed by adiabatic forces that arise from the free energy and by superadiabatic forces that are induced by the flow of the van Hove function. The superadia...
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Kinetics of isotropic to string-like phase switching in electrorheological fluids of nanocubes: Applying an electric field to polarisable colloidal particles, whose permittivity differs from that of the dispersing medium, generates induced dipoles that promote the formation of string-like clusters and ultimately alte...
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Surface phase transitions in foams and emulsions: Surface phase transitions in surfactant adsorption layers are known to affect the dynamic properties of foams and to induce surface nucleation in freezing emulsion drops. Recently, these transitions were found to play a role in several other phenomena, opening new oppor...
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Hydrodynamic response of a surfactant-laden interface to a radial flow: We study the features of a radial Stokes flow due to a submerged jet directed toward a liquid-air interface. The presence of surface-active impurities confers to the interface an in-plane elasticity that resists the incident flow. Both analytical a...
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Universality and stability phase-diagram of two-dimensional brittle fracture: The two-dimensional oscillatory crack instability, experimentally observed in a class of brittle materials under strongly dynamic conditions, has been recently reproduced by a nonlinear phase-field fracture theory. Here we highlight the uni...
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Ion clustering in aqueous salt solutions near the liquid/vapor interface: Molecular dynamics simulations of aqueous NaCl, KCl, NaI, and KI solutions are used to study the effects of salts on the properties of the liquid/vapor interface. The simulations use the models which include both charge transfer and polarization ...
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A comprehensive continuum theory of structured liquids: We develop a comprehensive continuum model capable of treating both electrostatic and structural interactions in liquid dielectrics. Starting from a two-order parameter description in terms of charge density and polarization, we derive a field-theoretic model gene...
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Phase diagram and melting scenarios of two-dimensional Hertzian spheres: We present computer simulations of a system of purely repulsive soft colloidal particles interacting via the Hertz potential and constrained to a two-dimensional plane. This potential describes the elastic interaction of weakly deformable bodies a...
cond-mat_soft
Hydrogel menisci: Shape, interaction, and instability: The interface of a soft hydrogel is easily deformed when it is in contact with particles, droplets or cells. Here we compute the intricate shapes of hydrogel menisci due to the indentation of point particles. The analysis is based on a free energy formulation, by w...
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Hourglass of constant weight: In contrast to a still common belief, a steadily flowing hourglass changes its weight in the course of time. We will show that, nevertheless, it is possible to construct hourglasses that do not change their weight.
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Mpemba-like effect protocol for granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks: We study the conditions under which a Mpemba-like effect emerges in granular gases of inelastic and rough hard disks driven by a class of thermostats characterized by the splitting of the noise intensity into translational and rotationa...
cond-mat_soft