Collective stiffening of soft hair assemblies.

Many living systems use assemblies of soft and slender structures whose deflections allow them to mechanically probe their immediate environment. In this work, we study the collective response of artificial soft hair assemblies to a shear flow by imaging their deflections. At all hair densities, the deflection is found to be proportional to the local shear stress with a proportionality factor that decreases with density. The measured collective stiffening of hairs is modeled both with a microscopic elastohydrodynamic model that takes into account long-range hydrodynamic hair-hair interactions and a phenomenological model that treats the hair assemblies as an effective porous medium. While the microscopic model is in reasonable agreement with the experiments at low hair density, the phenomenological model is found to be predictive across the entire density range.

Diffusion through Nanopores in Connected Lipid Bilayer Networks.

A biomimetic model of cell-cell communication was developed to probe the passive molecular transport across ion channels inserted in synthetic lipid bilayers formed between contacting droplets arranged in a linear array. Diffusion of a fluorescent probe across the array was measured for different pore concentrations. The diffusion characteristic timescale is found to vary nonlinearly with the pore concentration. Our measurements are successfully modeled by a continuous time random walk description whose waiting time is the first exit time from a droplet through a cluster of pores. The size of the cluster of pores is found to increase with their concentration. Our results provide a direct link between the mesoscopic permeation properties and the microscopic characteristics of the pores, such as their number, size, and spatial arrangement.

Field induced anisotropic cooperativity in a magnetic colloidal glass.

The translational dynamics of a repulsive colloidal glass-former is probed by time-resolved X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy. In this dense dispersion of charge-stabilized and magnetic nanoparticles, the interaction potential can be tuned, from quasi-isotropic to anisotropic by applying an external magnetic field. This powerful control parameter finely tunes the anisotropy of the intricate energy landscape in the colloidal glass-former, which is seen here as a new tunable model-system to probe the dynamical heterogeneities at the approach of the glass transition. Both structural and dynamical anisotropies are reported on interparticle lengthscales associated with highly anisotropic cooperativity, almost two orders of magnitude larger in the field direction than in the perpendicular direction and in zero field.

Normal contact and friction of rubber with model randomly rough surfaces.

We report on normal contact and friction measurements of model multicontact interfaces formed between smooth surfaces and substrates textured with a statistical distribution of spherical micro-asperities. Contacts are either formed between a rigid textured lens and a smooth rubber, or a flat textured rubber and a smooth rigid lens. Measurements of the real area of contact A versus normal load P are performed by imaging the light transmitted at the microcontacts. For both interfaces, A(P) is found to be sub-linear with a power law behavior. Comparison with two multi-asperity contact models, which extend the Greenwood-Williamson (J. Greenwood and J. Williamson, Proc. Royal Soc. London Ser. A, 295, 300 (1966)) model by taking into account the elastic interaction between asperities at different length scales, is performed, and allows their validation for the first time. We find that long range elastic interactions arising from the curvature of the nominal surfaces are the main source of the non-linearity of A(P). At a shorter range, and except for very low pressures, the pressure dependence of both density and area of microcontacts remains well described by Greenwood-Williamson's model, which neglects any interaction between asperities. In addition, in steady sliding, friction measurements reveal that the mean shear stress at the scale of the asperities is systematically larger than that found for a macroscopic contact between a smooth lens and a rubber. This suggests that frictional stresses measured at macroscopic length scales may not be simply transposed to microscopic multicontact interfaces.

Probing locally the onset of slippage at a model multicontact interface.

We report on the multicontact frictional dynamics of model elastomer surfaces rubbed against bare glass slides. The surfaces consist of layers patterned with thousands of spherical caps distributed both spatially and in height, regularly or randomly. Use of spherical asperities yields circular microcontacts whose radii are a direct measure of the contact pressure distribution. Optical tracking of individual contacts provides the in-plane deformations of the tangentially loaded interface, yielding the shear force distribution. We then investigate the stick-slip frictional dynamics of a regular hexagonal array. For all stick phases, slip precursors are evidenced and found to propagate quasistatically, normally to the isopressure contours. A simple quasistatic model relying on the existence of interfacial stress gradients is derived and predicts qualitatively the position of slip precursors.

Texture-induced modulations of friction force: the fingerprint effect.

Modulations of the friction force in dry solid friction are usually attributed to macroscopic stick-slip instabilities. Here we show that a distinct, quasistatic mechanism can also lead to nearly periodic force oscillations during sliding contact between an elastomer patterned with parallel grooves, and abraded glass slides. The dominant oscillation frequency is set by the ratio between the sliding velocity and the grooves period. A model is derived which quantitatively captures the dependence of the force modulations amplitude with the normal load, the grooves period, and the slides roughness characteristics. The model's main ingredient is the nonlinearity of the friction law. Since such nonlinearity is ubiquitous for soft solids, this "fingerprint effect" should be relevant to a large class of frictional configurations and have important consequences in human digital touch.

Rotational dynamics and aging in a magnetic colloidal glass.

We follow here the freezing of the orientational degrees of freedom of strongly interacting magnetic and charged nanoparticles, as the colloidal glass transition is approached. Using a magnetoinduced birefringence technique, we show that the rotational dynamics drastically slows down following a Vogel-Fulcher law. More precisely, this slowing down occurs above a volume fraction threshold phi*, the value of which depends on the range of electrostatic repulsion between nanoparticles. An interpretation in terms of effective spheres, slightly anisotropic, is proposed. The aging of the rotational dynamics of the more concentrated samples is reported on long time scales, with an exponential growth of the rotational characteristic time with the age t(w) of the sample. An attempt of age rescaling at different volume fractions leads us to introduce a phi-dependent "birth age" t(w)0(varphi) , which diverges analytically at the Vogel-Fulcher volume fraction.

Heterogeneous dynamics and ageing in a dense ferro-glass.

Repulsive magnetic fluids show a dynamical freezing above a volume fraction Φ(*), which depends on the physico-chemistry of the system. Φ(*) is here determined by a magneto-optical technique. The out-of-equilibrium dynamics of a glass-forming magnetic fluid (Φ = 1.2Φ(*)) is studied by x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy and analyzed in terms of intensity auto-correlation functions. The relaxation is age dependent and follows a compressed exponential law with a characteristic time scaling as the inverse of the scattering vector Q. The dynamical susceptibility χ is then deduced from a time resolved correlation analysis at an intermediate Q and for ages larger than 10(4) s.