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 how expanding or growing bodies respond to the presence of obstacles is relevant to many fields, including medicine, morphogenesis, and agriculture. We have used hydrogels, polymer networks that expand in water, as a model system to explore how stresses develop in this general scenario.
Obstructed swelling and fracture of hydrogels
Abigail Plummer*, Caroline Adkins*, Jean-François Louf, Andrej Košmrlj, Sujit S. Datta
Soft Matter (2024), preprint link
Metamaterials
Metamaterials composed of coupled bistable units have found applications in soft robotics, shape memory, and mechanical information processing in recent years. We are interested in how analogies from statistical mechanics can be used to better understand and control this class of material.
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
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