arXiv subjects

Anton Souslov

Publications and source records attributed to Anton Souslov.

51 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Localizing softness and stress along loops in three-dimensional topological metamaterials

Topological states can be used to control the mechanical properties of a material along an edge or around a localized defect. The surface rigidity of elastic networks is characterized by a bulk topological invariant called the polarization; materials with a well-defined uniform polarization display a dramatic range of edge softnesses depending on the orientation of the polarization relative to the terminating surface. However, in all three-dimensional mechanical metamaterials proposed to date, the topological edge modes are mixed with bulk soft modes and so-called Weyl loops. Here, we report the design of a gapped 3D topological metamaterial with a uniform polarization that displays a corresponding asymmetry between the number of soft modes on opposing surfaces and, in addition, no bulk soft modes. We then use this construction to localize topological soft modes in interior regions of the material by including defect structures---dislocation loops---that are unique to three dimensions. We derive a general formula that relates the difference in the number of soft modes and states of self-stress localized along the dislocation loop to the handedness of the vector triad formed by the lattice polarization, Burgers vector, and dislocation-line direction. Our findings suggest a novel strategy for pre-programming failure and softness localized along lines in 3D, while avoiding extended periodic failure modes associated with Weyl loops.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2017

Flocking from a quantum analogy: Spin-orbit coupling in an active fluid

Systems composed of strongly interacting self-propelled particles can form a spontaneously flowing polar active fluid. The study of the connection between the microscopic dynamics of a single such particle and the macroscopic dynamics of the fluid can yield insights into experimentally realizable active flows, but this connection is well understood in only a few select cases. We introduce a model of self-propelled particles based on an analogy with the motion of electrons that have strong spin-orbit coupling. We find that, within our model, self-propelled particles are subject to an analog of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle that relates translational and rotational noise. Furthermore, by coarse-graining this microscopic model, we establish expressions for the coefficients of the Toner-Tu equations---the hydrodynamic equations that describe an active fluid composed of these "active spins." The connection between self-propelled particles and quantum spins may help realize exotic phases of matter using active fluids via analogies with systems composed of strongly correlated electrons.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2017

Coupling the Leidenfrost Effect and Elastic Deformations to Power Sustained Bouncing

The Leidenfrost effect occurs when an object near a hot surface vaporizes rapidly enough to lift itself up and hover. Although well-understood for liquids and stiff sublimable solids, nothing is known about the effect with materials whose stiffness lies between these extremes. Here we introduce a new phenomenon that occurs with vaporizable soft solids: the elastic Leidenfrost effect. By dropping hydrogel spheres onto hot surfaces we find that, rather than hovering, they energetically bounce several times their diameter for minutes at a time. With high-speed video during a single impact, we uncover high-frequency microscopic gap dynamics at the sphere-substrate interface. We show how these otherwise-hidden agitations constitute work cycles that harvest mechanical energy from the vapour and sustain the bouncing. Our findings unleash a powerful and widely applicable strategy for injecting mechanical energy into soft materials, with relevance to fields ranging from soft robotics and metamaterials to microfluidics and active matter.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2017

Odd viscosity in chiral active fluids

Chiral active fluids are materials composed of self-spinning rotors that continuously inject energy and angular momentum at the microscale. Out-of-equilibrium fluids with active-rotor constituents have been experimentally realized using nanoscale biomolecular motors, microscale active colloids, or macroscale driven chiral grains. Here, we show how such chiral active fluids break both parity and time-reversal symmetries in their steady states, giving rise to a dissipationless linear-response coefficient called odd viscosity in their constitutive relations. Odd viscosity couples pressure and vorticity leading, for example, to density modulations within a vortex profile. Moreover, chiral active fluids flow in the direction transverse to applied compression as in shock propagation experiments. We envision that this collective transverse response may be exploited to design self-assembled hydraulic cranks that convert between linear and rotational motion in microscopic machines powered by active-rotors fluids.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2016

Topological sound in active-liquid metamaterials

Liquids composed of self-propelled particles have been experimentally realized using molecular, colloidal, or macroscopic constituents. These active liquids can flow spontaneously even in the absence of an external drive. Unlike spontaneous active flow, the propagation of density waves in confined active liquids is not well explored. Here, we exploit a mapping between density waves on top of a chiral flow and electrons in a synthetic gauge field to lay out design principles for artificial structures termed topological active metamaterials. We design metamaterials that break time-reversal symmetry using lattices composed of annular channels filled with a spontaneously flowing active liquid. Such active metamaterials support topologically protected sound modes that propagate unidirectionally, without backscattering, along either sample edges or domain walls and despite overdamped particle dynamics. Our work illustrates how parity-symmetry breaking in metamaterial structure combined with microscopic irreversibility of active matter leads to novel functionalities that cannot be achieved using only passive materials.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2016

Sonic Landau-level lasing and synthetic gauge fields in mechanical metamaterials

Mechanical strain can lead to a synthetic gauge field that controls the dynamics of electrons in graphene sheets as well as light in photonic crystals. Here, we show how to engineer an analogous synthetic gauge field for lattice vibrations. Our approach relies on one of two strategies: shearing a honeycomb lattice of masses and springs or patterning its local material stiffness. As a result, vibrational spectra with discrete Landau levels are generated. Upon tuning the strength of the gauge field, we can control the density of states and transverse spatial confinement of sound in the metamaterial. We also use the gauge field to design waveguides in which sound propagates robustly, as a consequence of the change in topological polarization that occurs along a domain wall in the bulk of the metamaterial. By introducing dissipation, we can selectively enhance the domain-wall-bound topological sound mode, a feature that may be exploited for the design of sound amplification by stimulated emission of radiation - SASERs, the mechanical analogs of lasers.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2016

Emergent collective properties of many-motor systems in one dimension

Along a microtubule, certain active motors propel themselves in one direction whereas others propel themselves in the opposite direction. For example, the cargo transporting motor proteins dynein and kinesin propel themselves towards the so-called plus- and minus-ends of the microtubule, respectively, and in so doing are able to pass one another, but not without interacting. We address the emergent collective behavior of systems composed of many motors, some propelling towards the plus-end and others propelling towards the minus-end. To do this, we used an analogy between this strongly interacting, far-from-equilibrium, classical stochastic many-motor system and a certain quantum-mechanical many-body system evolving in imaginary time. We apply well-known methods from quantum many-body theory, including self-consistent mean-field theory and bosonization, to shed light on phenomena exhibited by the many-motor system such as structure formation and the dynamics of collective modes at low-frequencies and long-wavelengths. In particular, via the bosonized description we find analogs of chiral Luttinger liquids, as well as a qualitative transition in the nature of the low-frequency modes---from propagating to purely dissipative---controlled by density and interaction strength.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2015

Beads on a string: Structure of bound aggregates of globular particles and long polymer chains

Macroscopic properties of suspensions, such as those composed of globular particles (e.g., colloidal or macromolecular), can be tuned by controlling the equilibrium aggregation of the particles. We examine how aggregation -- and, hence, macroscopic properties -- can be controlled in a system composed of both globular particles and long, flexible polymer chains that reversibly bind to one another. We base this on a minimal statistical mechanical model of a single aggregate in which the polymer chain is treated either as ideal or self-avoiding, and, in addition, the globular particles are taken to interact with one another via excluded volume repulsion. Furthermore, each of the globular particles is taken to have one single site to which at most one polymer segment may bind. Within the context of this model, we examine the statistics of the equilibrium size of an aggregate and, thence, the structure of dilute and semidilute suspensions of these aggregates. We apply the model to biologically relevant aggregates, specifically those composed of macromolecular proteoglycan globules and long hyaluronan polymer chains. These aggregates are especially relevant to the materials properties of cartilage and the structure-function properties of perineuronal nets in brain tissue, as well as the pericellular coats of mammalian cells.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2015

Emergent tilt order in Dirac polymer liquids

We study a liquid of zigzagging two-dimensional directed polymers with bending rigidity, i.e., polymers whose conformations follow checkerboard paths. In the continuum limit the statistics of such polymers obey the Dirac equation for particles of imaginary mass. We exploit this observation to investigate a liquid of these polymers via a quantum many-fermion analogy. A self-consistent approximation predicts a phase of tilted order, in which the polymers may develop a preference to zig rather than zag. We compute the phase diagram and key response functions for the polymer liquid, and comment on the role played by fluctuations.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2014

Impact of single-particle compressibility on the fluid-solid phase transition for ionic microgel suspensions

We study ionic microgel suspensions composed of swollen particles for various single-particle stiffnesses. We measure the osmotic pressure $π$ of these suspensions and show that it is dominated by the contribution of free ions in solution. As this ionic osmotic pressure depends on the volume fraction of the suspension $ϕ$, we can determine $ϕ$ from $π$, even at volume fractions so high that the microgel particles are compressed. We find that the width of the fluid-solid phase coexistence, measured using $ϕ$, is larger than its hard-sphere value for the stiffer microgels that we study and progressively decreases for softer microgels. For sufficiently soft microgels, the suspensions are fluid-like, irrespective of volume fraction. By calculating the dependence on $ϕ$ of the mean volume of a microgel particle, we show that the behavior of the phase-coexistence width correlates with whether or not the microgel particles are compressed at the volume fractions corresponding to fluid-solid coexistence.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2014

Mechanical instability at finite temperature

Many physical systems including lattices near structural phase transitions, glasses, jammed solids, and bio-polymer gels have coordination numbers that place them at the edge of mechanical instability. Their properties are determined by an interplay between soft mechanical modes and thermal fluctuations. In this paper we investigate a simple square-lattice model with a $ϕ^4$ potential between next-nearest-neighbor sites whose quadratic coefficient $κ$ can be tuned from positive negative. We show that its zero-temperature ground state for $κ<0$ is highly degenerate, and we use analytical techniques and simulation to explore its finite temperature properties. We show that a unique rhombic ground state is entropically favored at nonzero temperature at $κ<0$ and that the existence of a subextensive number of "floppy" modes whose frequencies vanish at $κ= 0$ leads to singular contributions to the free energy that render the square-to-rhombic transition first order and lead to power-law behavior of the shear modulus as a function of temperature. We expect our study to provide a general framework for the study of finite-temperature mechanical and phase behavior of other systems with a large number of floppy modes.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2013

Organization of strongly interacting directed polymer liquids in the presence of stringent constraints

The impact of impenetrable obstacles on the energetics and equilibrium structure of strongly repulsive directed polymers is investigated. As a result of the strong interactions, regions of severe polymer depletion and excess are found in the vicinity of the obstacle, and the associated free-energy cost is found to scale quadratically with the average polymer density. The polymer-polymer interactions are accounted for via a sequence of transformations: from the 3D line liquid to a 2D fluid of Bose particles to a 2D composite fermion fluid and, finally, to a 2D one-component plasma. The results presented here are applicable to a range of systems consisting of noncrossing directed lines.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2011

Isostaticity, auxetic response, surface modes, and conformal invariance in twisted kagome lattices

Model lattices consisting of balls connected by central-force springs provide much of our understanding of mechanical response and phonon structure of real materials. Their stability depends critically on their coordination number $z$. $d$-dimensional lattices with $z=2d$ are at the threshold of mechanical stability and are isostatic. Lattices with $z<2d$ exhibit zero-frequency "floppy" modes that provide avenues for lattice collapse. The physics of systems as diverse as architectural structures, network glasses, randomly packed spheres, and biopolymer networks is strongly influenced by a nearby isostatic lattice. We explore elasticity and phonons of a special class of two-dimensional isostatic lattices constructed by distorting the kagome lattice. We show that the phonon structure of these lattices, characterized by vanishing bulk moduli and thus negative Poisson ratios and auxetic elasticity, depends sensitively on boundary conditions and on the nature of the kagome distortions. We construct lattices that under free boundary conditions exhibit surface floppy modes only or a combination of both surface and bulk floppy modes; and we show that bulk floppy modes present under free boundary conditions are also present under periodic boundary conditions but that surface modes are not. In the the long-wavelength limit, the elastic theory of all these lattices is a conformally invariant field theory with holographic properties, and the surface waves are Rayleigh waves. We discuss our results in relation to recent work on jammed systems. Our results highlight the importance of network architecture in determining floppy-mode structure.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2011

Order-by-disorder in the antiferromagnetic Ising model on an elastic triangular lattice

Geometrically frustrated materials have a ground-state degeneracy that may be lifted by subtle effects, such as higher order interactions causing small energetic preferences for ordered structures. Alternatively, ordering may result from entropic differences between configurations in an effect termed order-by-disorder. Motivated by recent experiments in a frustrated colloidal system in which ordering is suspected to result from entropy, we consider in this paper, the antiferromagnetic Ising model on a deformable triangular lattice. We calculate the displacements exactly at the microscopic level, and contrary to previous studies, find a partially disordered ground state of randomly zigzagging stripes. Each such configuration is deformed differently and thus has a unique phonon spectrum with distinct entropy, thus lifting the degeneracy at finite temperature. Nonetheless, due to the free-energy barriers between the ground-state configurations, the system falls into a disordered glassy state.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2009

Elasticity and Response in Nearly Isostatic Periodic Lattices

The square and kagome lattices with nearest neighbor springs of spring constant $k$ are isostatic with a number of zero-frequency modes that scale with their perimeter. We analytically study the approach to this isostatic limit as the spring constant $k'$ for next-nearest-neighbor bonds vanishes. We identify a characteristic frequency $ω^* \sim \sqrt{k'}$ and length $l^* \sim \sqrt{k/k'}$ for both lattices. The shear modulus $C_{44}= k'$ of the square lattice vanishes with $k'$, but that for the kagome lattice does not.

cond-mat.soft↗