1128 papers
Soft matter physics explores the strange and wonderful world of materials that are easily deformed by heat or gentle forces, ranging from everyday plastics and foams to the complex gels inside living cells. This field bridges the gap between simple liquids and rigid solids, revealing how microscopic interactions create the flexible, squishy properties we see in nature and industry.
At Gist.Science, we process every new preprint in this category directly from arXiv to make these discoveries accessible to everyone. Whether you need a quick plain-language overview or a deep dive into the detailed technical analysis, our summaries break down complex findings without losing scientific rigor.
Below are the latest papers in soft matter physics, freshly processed and ready for you to explore.
This paper investigates the link between energy dissipation and symmetry breaking in amorphous solids under quasi-static strain, demonstrating through a solvable mesoscopic theory and numerical simulations that dissipation arises specifically from rotational symmetry breaking during a sharp transition between conservative and dissipative mechanical responses.
This paper analytically solves the Fokker-Planck equation for an overdamped Brownian particle in a tilted cosine potential to derive the intermediate scattering function and related dynamical moments using spectral theory and perturbation methods, with results validated by simulations across various tilting force regimes.
This study demonstrates that cyclic protein binding and unbinding, modeled as an off-lattice active Potts system with state-dependent spontaneous curvatures, can induce oscillating "blinking" membrane domains even in tensionless conditions, unlike the stable hexagonal patterns formed in thermal equilibrium.
This study elucidates how substrate wettability and nanoparticle concentration govern the formation and tunable morphology of wetting layers in bicontinuous particle-stabilized emulsion (bijel) films produced via solvent-transfer-induced phase separation, providing critical insights for optimizing their application in separation and catalysis.
This paper presents and validates a reduced-order continuum model, supported by numerical simulations and experiments, to describe the bulldozing of an immersed granular pile in a confined channel by treating the system as coupled thin films of visco-plastic grains and fluid.
This paper presents a theoretical framework and analytical expressions for the intermediate scattering function of colloids in a periodic laser potential, validated through numerical simulations, Brownian dynamics, and experiments, to characterize particle dynamics and extract key transport properties like diffusivity and non-Gaussian behavior.
This computational study investigates the creep and yielding behavior of athermal gels and fiber networks under constant shear stress, revealing how non-affine viscoelastic deformations and irreversible filament breakage drive power-law creep and eventual catastrophic failure, while also determining the material's capacity for shape recovery after load removal.
This study combines rheology and X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy to reveal that the protracted stress relaxation and loss of recoverable strain in a sheared nanocolloidal glass are driven by spatially heterogeneous, banded backflow dynamics, whereas subsequent strain recovery proceeds via uniform, purely affine motion.
This paper demonstrates that molecular aggregation can be strategically engineered as a design parameter rather than a parasitic effect to achieve room-temperature strong coupling with high coupling energies (up to 324 meV) in solution-processed, low-quality-factor metallic microcavities, thereby overcoming the traditional requirement for highly ordered excitonic media and high-quality optical resonators.
This paper demonstrates that weak non-conservative dynamics, such as growth or degradation in biological systems, arrest coarsening and stabilize nonequilibrium microphase-separated states in scalar active matter, where reaction terms primarily drive microphase separation while activity controls the resulting domain morphology.