Soft materials articles within Nature Physics

Featured

  • Article |

    Cilia are composed of cytoskeletal filaments and molecular motors and are characterized by a wave-like motion. Here the authors show that this motion is reconstituted in vitro from the self-assembly of polymerizing actin filaments and myosin motors.

    • Marie Pochitaloff
    • , Martin Miranda
    •  & Pascal Martin

  • News & Views |

    Colloidal random lasers are hard to design and control. Combining optically controlled micro-heaters with thermophilic particles attracted by them leads to microlasers with programmable and reversible patterns.

    • Neda Ghofraniha

  • Editorial |

    Glass, now celebrated with a dedicated International Year, continues to fascinate.

  • News & Views |

    Two-dimensional model glasses exhibit characteristics in their low-frequency vibrational density of states that can be traced to the quasilocalized dynamics of string-like objects. This finding provides an explanation for a universal feature of glasses known as the boson peak.

    • Lothar Wondraczek

  • Article |

    The relation between physical properties and structure in amorphous materials is poorly understood. Simulations now show that vibrations of string-like dynamical defects likely govern the low-temperature dynamics in these systems.

    • Yuan-Chao Hu
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many organelles in the cell are not encapsulated in a membrane—they are liquid-like domains formed through phase separation. The liquid-like nature of such domains leads to adhesive interactions between the cytoskeleton filaments and organelles.

    • Thomas J. Böddeker
    • , Kathryn A. Rosowski
    •  & Eric R. Dufresne

  • Article |

    Whether and when a material deforms elastically or plastically depends on its microstructure. Experiments on two-dimensional colloidal systems show that in disordered materials, packing density, stress and a microstructure-related entropy govern deformations.

    • K. L. Galloway
    • , E. G. Teich
    •  & P. E. Arratia

  • News & Views |

    • Bart Verberck

  • Letter |

    Active matter exhibits a plethora of collective phenomena in both biological and artificial systems. In a model system of colloidal rollers, polar states in active liquids can be controlled.

    • Bo Zhang
    • , Hang Yuan
    •  & Alexey Snezhko

  • News & Views |

    Active matter can have macroscopic properties that defy the usual laws of hydrodynamics. Now these tell-tale properties have been traced down to the non-equilibrium character and handedness of interactions between individual particles.

    • Patrick Pietzonka

  • Article |

    Active fluids exhibit properties reminiscent of equilibrium systems when their degrees of freedom are statistically decoupled. A theory for the fluctuating hydrodynamics of these fluids offers a probe of their anomalous transport coefficients.

    • Ming Han
    • , Michel Fruchart
    •  & Vincenzo Vitelli

  • Article |

    The cell cortex stiffens during cell division, facilitating the necessary shape changes. Microrheology measurements now reveal that the rest of the cell interior actually softens, in a process that probably involves two key biomolecules trading roles.

    • Sebastian Hurst
    • , Bart E. Vos
    •  & Timo Betz

  • Letter |

    A study of growing apples shows that the singular cusp at the stalk has a universal form that arises due to the differential growth of a soft solid. Although the cusps are usually symmetric, they can lose stability to form lobes that depend on the geometry of the fruit.

    • Aditi Chakrabarti
    • , Thomas C. T. Michaels
    •  & L. Mahadevan

  • News & Views |

    The flagella of microorganisms have provided inspiration for many synthetic devices, but they’re typically not easy to produce. A new class of swimmer makes it look simple by spontaneously growing a tail that it can whip to self-propel.

    • Sophie Ramananarivo

  • News & Views |

    A type of polar self-propelled particle generates a torque that makes it naturally drawn to higher-density areas. The collective behaviour this induces in assemblies of particles constitutes a new form of phase separation in active fluids.

    • Olivier Dauchot

  • Article |

    Active matter particles self-propel but controlling their direction of motion can be challenging. Here the authors place motile bacteria inside microdroplets and control their propulsion by exploiting the asymmetric director structure of the surrounding liquid crystal.

    • Mojtaba Rajabi
    • , Hend Baza
    •  & Oleg D. Lavrentovich

  • Article |

    The authors investigate the role of spherical confinement and curvature-induced topological defects on the crystallization of charged colloids. They conclude that crystallization in spherical confinement is due to a combination of thermodynamics and kinetic pathways.

    • Yanshuang Chen
    • , Zhenwei Yao
    •  & Peng Tan

  • Research Highlight |

    • Elizaveta Dubrovina

  • Article |

    The authors investigate out-of-equilibrium crystallization of a binary mixture of sphere-like nanoparticles in small droplets. They observe the spontaneous formation of an icosahedral structure with stable MgCu2 phases, which are promising for photonic applications.

    • Da Wang
    • , Tonnishtha Dasgupta
    •  & Alfons van Blaaderen

  • Article |

    The structures of stingers of living organisms are surprisingly similar despite their vastly different lengths. Now, stingers are found to obey a unifying mechanistic principle that characterizes the stingers resistance to buckling.

    • Kaare H. Jensen
    • , Jan Knoblauch
    •  & Keunhwan Park

  • News & Views |

    Equilibrium self-assembly processes find free-energy minima but no such general statement holds for systems driven out of equilibrium. A new study has employed laser-induced convective flows to achieve dissipative self-assembly across multiple scales with universal growth and fluctuation statistics.

    • Gili Bisker

  • Article |

    Biological systems are able to self-assemble in non-equilibrium conditions thanks to a continuous injection of energy. Here the authors present a tool to achieve non-equilibrium self-assembly of synthetic and biological constituents with sizes spanning three orders of magnitude.

    • Ghaith Makey
    • , Sezin Galioglu
    •  & Serim Ilday

  • Article |

    Determining the properties that emerge from the equations that govern turbulent flow is a fundamental challenge in non-equilibrium physics. A hydrodynamic theory for two-dimensional active nematic fluids at vanishing Reynolds number is now put forward, revealing a universal scaling behaviour for this class of systems.

    • Ricard Alert
    • , Jean-François Joanny
    •  & Jaume Casademunt

  • Article |

    Experiments on the deformation and bursting of elastic capsules impacting rigid walls are reported, revealing an analogy to the impact of liquid drops. The developed model for macroscopic objects could potentially be expanded to microscopic scales.

    • Etienne Jambon-Puillet
    • , Trevor J. Jones
    •  & P.-T. Brun

  • News & Views |

    A small twist to a field theory, a giant leap for its phenomenology. Waiving the standard requirement of energy conservation in linear elasticity unravels unexpected mechanical behaviour that has previously been overlooked.

    • Valerio Peri
    •  & Sebastian D. Huber

  • Letter |

    In a process dubbed elastic ripening, compressive stresses in a polymer network are shown to suppress phase separation of the solvent that swells it, stabilizing mixtures well beyond the liquid–liquid phase separation boundary.

    • Kathryn A. Rosowski
    • , Tianqi Sai
    •  & Eric R. Dufresne

  • Letter |

    In natural materials, defects determine many properties. In spin-analogue mechanical metamaterials, deterministically inserted topological defects enable the design of complex deformation and stress distributions.

    • Anne S. Meeussen
    • , Erdal C. Oğuz
    •  & Martin van Hecke

  • Research Highlight |

    • Elizaveta Dubrovina

  • News & Views |

    It is generally difficult to know in advance if a sheet of paper can be folded into an origami shape, but for quadrilateral crease patterns a tiling approach can identify all possible ways of folding them.

    • Christian Santangelo

  • Article |

    A chiral fluid comprising spinning colloidal magnets exhibits macroscopic dynamics reminiscent of the free surface flows of Newtonian fluids, together with unique features suggestive of Hall—or odd—viscosity.

    • Vishal Soni
    • , Ephraim S. Bililign
    •  & William T. M. Irvine

  • Article |

    In a model system crosslinked by motors, cytoskeletal polymers slide past each other at speeds independent of their polarity. This behaviour is best described within an active-gel framework that deviates from the dilute limit set by existing theory.

    • Sebastian Fürthauer
    • , Bezia Lemma
    •  & Michael J. Shelley

  • Article |

    Braiding by topological defects in an active nematic fluid produces macroscopic chaotic advection, such that the defects themselves act as effective stirring rods. The resultant mixing is revealed to be a result of sliding on a molecular scale.

    • Amanda J. Tan
    • , Eric Roberts
    •  & Linda S. Hirst

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