Soft materials articles within Nature Physics

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  • News & Views |

    There is growing evidence for the kinetics of homogeneous nucleation being a multi-step process. Colloid experiments and simulations now suggest that heterogeneous nucleation is no exception.

    • Rajesh Ganapathy
    •  & Ajay K. Sood

  • Article |

    Controlled crystal growth can be achieved by initiating nucleation on a substrate — but the mechanisms at play are still poorly understood. Experiments and simulations now reveal conditions for the growth of defect-free crystals of charged colloids.

    • Shunto Arai
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • News & Views |

    Ensembles of magnetic colloids can undergo an instability triggering the formation of clusters that move faster than the particles themselves. The many-body process relies on hydrodynamics alone and may prove useful for load delivery in fluidics.

    • Pietro Tierno

  • Letter |

    Collections of rolling colloids are shown to pinch off into motile clusters resembling droplets sliding down a windshield. These stable dynamic structures are formed through a fingering instability that relies on hydrodynamic interactions alone.

    • Michelle Driscoll
    • , Blaise Delmotte
    •  & Paul Chaikin

  • Letter |

    When deforming snow slowly, it resists. But when applying a deformation rapidly, it gives in more easily. Experiments now reveal propagating deformation bands and the localization of strain in compressed snow — both natural and artificial.

    • Thomas W. Barraclough
    • , Jane R. Blackford
    •  & Michael Zaiser

  • Letter |

    In a nematic liquid crystal, electron orbitals align themselves along one axis, as rods. Thermodynamic observations of such rod-like alignments in CuxBi2Se3 provide evidence for a nematic superconductor.

    • Shingo Yonezawa
    • , Kengo Tajiri
    •  & Yoshiteru Maeno

  • News & Views |

    Simple models have given us surprising insight into how animals flock, but most assume they do so through a homogeneous landscape. Colloidal experiments now suggest that a little disorder can have unexpected — and spectacular — effects.

    • C. J. Olson Reichhardt
    •  & C. Reichhardt

  • Letter |

    Our understanding of collective animal behaviour generally assumes that flocks and herds move through homogeneous environments. Colloidal experiments suggest that flocking can be distorted or even suppressed by the introduction of disorder.

    • Alexandre Morin
    • , Nicolas Desreumaux
    •  & Denis Bartolo

  • Letter |

    Spindle-shaped cells readily form nematic structures marked by topological defects. When confined, the defect distribution is independent of the domain size, activity and type of cell, lending a stability not found in non-cellular active nematics.

    • Guillaume Duclos
    • , Christoph Erlenkämper
    •  & Pascal Silberzan

  • Letter |

    The response of amorphous solids to external stress is not very well understood. A study now shows that certain glasses, upon decreasing temperature, undergo a phase transition characterized by diverging nonlinear elastic moduli.

    • Giulio Biroli
    •  & Pierfrancesco Urbani

  • Measure for Measure |

    Some concepts are useful but difficult to quantify, as Philip Ball illustrates with the property of hydrophobicity.

    • Philip Ball

  • Article |

    Chameleons rely on strong adhesion to manoeuvre prey with their tongues at high speeds across distances up to twice their body length. A large contact area and high mucus viscosity are shown to engender an efficient capture mechanism.

    • Fabian Brau
    • , Déborah Lanterbecq
    •  & Pascal Damman

  • Letter |

    Populations of growing yeast are shown to undergo a jamming transition typically observed in gravity-driven granular flows. The pressures generated by intercellular forces are found to be large enough to destroy the cells’ micro-environment.

    • Morgan Delarue
    • , Jörn Hartung
    •  & Oskar Hallatschek

  • News & Views |

    The dynamics of a viscous liquid undergo a dramatic slowdown when it is cooled to form a solid glass. Recognizing the structural changes across such a transition remains a major challenge. Machine-learning methods, similar to those Facebook uses to recognize groups of friends, have now been applied to this problem.

    • Michele Ceriotti
    •  & Vincenzo Vitelli

  • Letter |

    Amorphous packings of spheres subject to shear and friction jam above a critical density. Simulations now show that shear results in geometrical patterns that are precursors to jammed structures and that friction effectuates the jamming.

    • H. A. Vinutha
    •  & Srikanth Sastry

  • Letter |

    A 3D-printed fetal brain undergoes constrained expansion to reproduce the shape of the human cerebral cortex. The soft gels of the model swell in solvent, mimicking cortical growth and revealing the mechanical origin of the brain’s folded geometry.

    • Tuomas Tallinen
    • , Jun Young Chung
    •  & L. Mahadevan

  • Letter |

    The relation between structure and dynamics in glasses is not fully understood. A new approach based on machine learning now reveals a correlation between softness—a structural property—and glassy dynamics.

    • S. S. Schoenholz
    • , E. D. Cubuk
    •  & A. J. Liu

  • Letter |

    Mechanical communication between cells is revealed in experiments on cardiac cells. Deformation of an underlying substrate induces beating in isolated cells, at a rate that can be sustained for over an hour after the stimulation ceases.

    • Ido Nitsan
    • , Stavit Drori
    •  & Shelly Tzlil

  • Article |

    A study of robots jumping on granular media reveals that performance depends on an added-mass effect born of grains solidifying on impact. Techniques that are optimized for launching off hard surfaces are shown to be compromised by the effect.

    • Jeffrey Aguilar
    •  & Daniel I. Goldman

  • Article |

    A study of a composite soft-matter nanomechanical system consisting of a rotating ring of optically trapped colloidal particles confining a set of untrapped colloids demonstrates the possibility of gearwheel-like torque transmission on the nanoscale.

    • Ian Williams
    • , Erdal C. Oğuz
    •  & C. Patrick Royall

  • Article |

    Cells moving in a tissue undergo a rigidity transition resembling that of active particles jamming at a critical density—but the tissue density stays constant. A new type of rigidity transition implicates the physical properties of the cells.

    • Dapeng Bi
    • , J. H. Lopez
    •  & M. Lisa Manning

  • News & Views |

    Crushing a brittle porous medium such as a box of cereal causes the grains to break up and rearrange themselves. A lattice spring model based on simple physical assumptions gives rise to behaviours that are complex enough to reproduce diverse compaction patterns.

    • Nicolas Vandewalle

  • Letter |

    When compacting a brittle porous medium—think stepping on fresh snow—patterns develop. Simulations and densification experiments with cereals now provide an understanding of compaction patterns in terms of a lattice model with breakable springs.

    • François Guillard
    • , Pouya Golshan
    •  & Itai Einav

  • News & Views |

    Granular charging can create some spectacular interactions, but gravity obscures our ability to observe and understand them. A neat desktop experiment circumvents this problem, shining a light on granular clustering — and perhaps even planet formation.

    • Frank Spahn
    •  & Martin Seiβ

  • News & Views |

    A 2006 Nature Physics paper reported phonons in a one-dimensional crystal of aqueous droplets traversing a laminar oil flow — putting microfluidics on the map as a tool for unravelling the mechanisms behind regularity in thermodynamically open systems.

    • Piotr Garstecki
    •  & Robert Hołyst

  • Article |

    Solids embedded with fluid inclusions are intuitively softer than their pure counterparts. But experiments show that when the droplets are small enough, material can become stiffer—highlighting a role for surface tension.

    • Robert W. Style
    • , Rostislav Boltyanskiy
    •  & Eric R. Dufresne

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