School of Physics Special Soft Matter/Biophysics Seminar: Prof. Xiaoming Mao,  University of Michigan

The “softness” of soft materials often originates from their proximity to mechanical instabilities. Recent advances in soft matter research have revealed multiple classes of mechanical instabilities, featuring different types of transitions, and corresponding to a wide range of experimental systems, from granular materials to biological tissues and self-assembled structures. In this talk we discuss two topics centered around the concept of mechanical instability. The first topic concerns how thermal fluctuations lead to interesting finite-temperature phase diagrams near rigidity transitions in ordered and disordered systems [1,2]. The second topic addresses how alignment of polymers in the extra-cellular matrix (ECM) affects cell motility and how we can characterize the nonlinear elasticity and alignment of the ECM based on mechanical instability [3].

 [1] X Mao, A Souslov, CI Mendoza, and TC Lubensky, Mechanical instability at finite temperature, Nature Comms 6, 5968 (2015).

[2] L Zhang and X Mao, Finite temperature mechanical instability in disordered lattices, arXiv:1503.05274 (2015).

[3] J Feng, H Levine, X Mao, and L Sander, Alignment and nonlinear elasticity in biopolymer gels, Phys Rev E 91, 042710 (2015).