Elastic Relaxation and Response to Deformation of Soft Gels

Soft amorphous solids such as gels made of particles or small aggregates form in a variety of soft matter systems. The complexity of the large scale organization of the gel network, its elasticity, and the mechanical heterogeneities that can be easily generated during the gel self-assembly have implications for the aging properties of those materials and their strongly nonlinear mechanical response. Here we review our recent work where we used 3D numerical simulations of a microscopic model to investigate how the competition between thermal fluctuations and elastic relaxation can qualitatively change the gel aging and how the network topology fundamentally determines the nonlinear response under shear. The insight gained through the numerical simulations helps us rationalize various experimental observations and identify new routes for material design.