Soft materials articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    The jury's still out on how glasses and other disordered materials form. However, a new framework suggests that we can understand their mechanical properties without this information, by using the physics of jamming.

    • Giulio Biroli

  • News & Views |

    When a bubble bursts at a liquid–gas interface, a portion of gas is released from the liquid. Now, another, counterintuitive process is reported: rapid motion generated by bubble-bursting transports oil droplets from the surface into the interior of a volume of water.

    • Jens Eggers

  • Article |

    When a bubble bursts on reaching a surface, mass transfer from the liquid to the gas phase can occur—aerosol dispersion. Now, the inverse transport process is reported: submicrometre-sized oil droplets, formed during bubble-bursting, are zipped across the interface to the liquid phase.

    • Jie Feng
    • , Matthieu Roché
    •  & Howard A. Stone

  • Letter |

    Jammed systems are typically thought of as being amorphous. Simulations of packings with varying disorder reveal a crossover from crystalline behaviour, which suggests the physics of jamming also applies to highly ordered systems—providing a new framework for understanding amorphous solids.

    • Carl P. Goodrich
    • , Andrea J. Liu
    •  & Sidney R. Nagel

  • Letter |

    When a water drop bounces back from a hydrophobic surface, its initial, spherical shape is usually restored. Now, experiments with a specially engineered superhydrophobic surface made from micrometre-sized tapered pillars covered with copper oxide ‘nanoflowers’ show that droplets can bounce back with a flat, pancake-like shape.

    • Yahua Liu
    • , Lisa Moevius
    •  & Zuankai Wang

  • News & Views |

    Disks interacting via particular potentials self-organize into triangles that stabilize mosaics with 10-, 12-, 18- and 24-fold symmetry, as revealed by computer simulations. Discoveries of further novel quasicrystals may now be within reach.

    • Michael Engel
    •  & Sharon C. Glotzer

  • News & Views |

    Experiments in microfluidics reveal long-range orientational correlations in the velocities of flowing droplets that can be rationalized in terms of an analytically solvable model.

    • Howard A. Stone
    •  & Shashi Thutupalli

  • Letter |

    Ensembles of micrometre-sized water droplets in a laminar oil flow are ideal systems for studying non-equilibrium dynamics. In the case of two-dimensional confinement, the interactions between the droplets’ flow-induced dipole moments lead to long-range velocity correlations and four-fold angular symmetry—behaviour that can be understood from first-principle hydrodynamics calculations.

    • Itamar Shani
    • , Tsevi Beatus
    •  & Tsvi Tlusty

  • News & Views |

    According to classical nucleation theory, a crystal grows from a small nucleus that already bears the symmetry of its end phase — but experiments with colloids now reveal that, from an amorphous precursor, crystallites with different structures can develop.

    • László Gránásy
    •  & Gyula I. Tóth

  • Article |

    Assemblies of colloidal particles provide a micrometre-scale analogue of atomic and molecular liquids and solids. Now, real-time visualization of the liquid-solid transition in systems of spherical colloids reveals complex pathways involving precursors of hexagonal close-packed, body-centred cubic and face-centred cubic symmetry.

    • Peng Tan
    • , Ning Xu
    •  & Lei Xu

  • Research Highlights |

    • Bart Verberck

  • News & Views |

    A simulation study of a model that mimics certain colloidal particles reveals a surprising low-temperature triumph of entropy, whereby the liquid state persists down to zero temperature.

    • Jeppe C. Dyre

  • Article |

    Active materials, such as motile cells and self-propelled colloids, exhibit glassy effects, but little is known about the glass transition far from equilibrium. A study of model glasses subject to non-thermal driving and dissipation reveals signatures of dynamic arrest that can be understood in terms of an effective equilibrium description.

    • Ludovic Berthier
    •  & Jorge Kurchan

  • Research Highlights |

    • Abigail Klopper

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