Physical Review E

The DSNP Dissertation Award Selection Committee presents the 2025 Award sponsored by Physical Review E.

Combining experiments and simulations, this paper explores the collective behavior of active granular rotors. It is shown that an effective attractive interaction controlled by rotational activity and particle shape leads to the particles’ self-assembly into chainlike structures.

#AdvancingField #TheoryExperiment

In order to describe diffusion of a particle in a thin layer of varying thickness, the author uses a mapping procedure originally derived for one-dimensional channels to obtain an effective two-dimensional equation. The resulting description of diffusion in such a confined geometry can be useful for systems like particles moving in thin films and particle separators.

#AdvancingField #TechnicalAdvancement

This paper reports an experimental demonstration of beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration in which the plasma is produced by laser filamentation of low-pressure nitrogen inside a capillary. Results demonstrate that filament-generated plasmas are a viable plasma source offering operational reproducibility.

#TimelyTopic #TheoryExperiment

Diffusion with a resetting mechanism provides a framework for modeling a wide range of natural phenomena. This work investigates the influence of stochastic resetting on diffusion of a Brownian particle in a closed domain with a trap. The authors focus on the average mean first passage time as a function of resetting rate. They find that a closed domain can produce unexpected results. The optimal resetting rate can vary abruptly or continuously, for example, depending upon parameters.

#TimelyTopic #ElegantVisuals

When colloidal particles in single layer have some space to move up or down, they can form a buckled crystal. Two kinds of translational order, a nearly triangular lattice and a frustrated pattern of up and down particles, have defects whose interaction affects the evolution of the system.

#SoftMatterSpotlight #TheoryExperiment

Despite many models proposed to explain charging behavior between insulating particles, the mechanisms underlying triboelectric charging have remained an open question in nonequilibrium physics. This manuscript presents a new experimental method to measure charge transfer during collisions between individual pairs of levitated particles, showing that charge evolution saturates as predicted by the condenser model.

#AdvancingField #TimelyTopic #TheoryExperiment

Ocean oxygen as a potential Earth tipping element has been largely overlooked in the literature. This Perspective argues that a dynamical systems approach complemented with a mathematical model accounting for the oxygen production by phytoplankton photosynthesis can provide a valuable insight into this issue.

Using molecular dynamics simulations, the authors explore gelation in colloids tied together by reversible linkers. They find that different connectivity measures govern ordinary percolation, rigidity percolation, and rheological gelation.

#AdvancingField #WellStructured #SoftMatterSpotlight

Shape-optimized microfluidic channels enable high-throughput characterization of microscopic soft matter, providing precise spatiotemporal stress fields to bridge bulk mechanical measurements and single-particle dynamics.

Pretransitional fluctuations show that flexoelectric coupling between polarization and molecular shape drives achiral fluids to spontaneously form chiral heliconical structures through polar biaxial ordering.

#ElegantVisuals #TheoryExperiment #SoftMatterSpotlight

A simple three-parameter analytical model uses a phenomenologically motivated ansatz to describe the peak, duration, and temporal evolution of a single epidemic wave.

#WellStructured #ClearMotivation

Interactions in a plasma between microparticles of two different diameters are investigated. In these experiments, the smaller microparticles form a layer above the larger microparticles in the plasma sheath, and three-dimensional trajectories are determined from videos. The authors deduce ion-wake forces and microparticle charges from the measured oscillation frequencies.

#WellStructured

In this Letter, the authors present an asymptotic theory that incorporates link extensibility into discrete models of single-chain polymer thermodynamics. The resulting approximation is first-order accurate in inverse link stiffness, with quadratically decreasing error, and recovers extensible behavior across all link stiffnesses from a single rigid-link reference calculation.

#SoftMatterSpotlight #TechnicalAdvancement

We are happy to share the winning entries of the Fifth Gallery of Soft Matter in this PRE Guest Editorial. They feature images and videos of avalanching photoelastic grains, swelling seeds that wrinkle as they raft on water, self-assembled networks of DNA and starch, and biodegradable yarns knitted from algae.

The leadership of the APS Division of Computational Physics presents its 2025 Rahman and Metropolis Awards.