Research & Publications

Brief descriptions of current areas of focus are given below. Asterisks denote equal contribution. For a complete and up-to-date list of publications, please see Google Scholar.

Mechanics of growth and swelling

Understanding the factors that either stimulate or hinder growth and expansion is relevant to many fields, including medicine, morphogenesis, and agriculture. We are particularly interested in studying how expanding or growing bodies respond to the presence of obstacles. Recently, we have focused on how hydrogels can be used as a model system to explore how stresses develop.

Obstructed swelling and fracture of hydrogels
Abigail Plummer*, Caroline Adkins*, Jean-François Louf, Andrej Košmrlj, Sujit S. Datta
Soft Matter (2024), preprint link, presentation link

Chemically Nanostructured Organogel Monoliths from Cross-Linked Block Copolymers for Selective Infusion Templating
Yuanzhi Li, Abigail Plummer, Jörg G. Werner
ACS Nano (2024)

Metamaterials

Metamaterials produce unusual/desirable responses through their carefully designed structure. Currently, we are primarily interested in how analogies from statistical mechanics can be used to better understand and control metamaterials composed of coupled bistable units. Such metamaterials have found applications in soft robotics, shape memory, and mechanical information processing in recent years.

Buckling and metastability in membranes with dilation arrays
Abigail Plummer and David R. Nelson
Physical Review E (2020) [Editor’s Suggestion], preprint link

Anomalous thermal expansion in Ising-like puckered sheets
Paul Z. Hanakata, Abigail Plummer, and David R. Nelson
Physical Review Letters (2022), preprint link

Curvature as an external field in mechanical antiferromagnets
Abigail Plummer*, Paul Z. Hanakata*, and David R. Nelson
Physical Review Materials (2022) [Editor’s Suggestion], preprint link

Statistical mechanics of the flexural Ising model in D dimensions
Abigail Plummer
arXiv preprint

SLAAM seminar recording (second half)

Beaded metamaterials
Lauren Dreier, Trevor J. Jones, Abigail Plummer, Andrej Košmrlj, P.-T. Brun
arXiv preprint

Geosciences

Building deeper connections between soft matter and the geosciences is an exciting frontier. We have worked on understanding how ecological competition is affected by turbulent fluid flows and have simulated instabilities in a solar tachocline model.

Oceanic frontal divergence alters phytoplankton competition and distribution
Abigail Plummer*, Mara Freilich*, Roberto Benzi, Chang Jae Choi, Lisa Sudek, Alexandra Z. Worden, Federico Toschi, and Amala Mahadevan
Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans (2023), preprint link

Discrete Eulerian model for population genetics and dynamics under flow
Giorgia Guccione, Roberto Benzi, Abigail Plummer, and Federico Toschi
Physical Review E (2019), preprint link

Fixation probabilities in weakly compressible fluid flows
Abigail Plummer, Roberto Benzi, David R. Nelson, and Federico Toschi
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019), preprint link, presentation link

Joint instability and abrupt nonlinear transitions in a differentially rotating plasma
Abigail Plummer, J. B. Marston, and Steven M. Tobias
Journal of Plasma Physics (2019), preprint link