Gels’ ’memory’ guides their mechanical properties

Publication of the Physics Laboratory in the journal Nature Physics on May 4, 2023. Communication of the CNRS-INSIS on May 9, 2023. The more solids a gel contains, the more solid it is. However, this principle is not sufficient to explain all the mechanical behaviors observed in reality. An international team has discovered that the macroscopic mechanical properties of gels are due to heterogeneities in their structure, inherited from the singular microstructure that the material adopts at the very moment of its gelation. Published in Nature Physics , this work establishes for the first time a quantitative link between microstructure and macroscopic mechanical properties of particulate gels. Soft particulate gels are composed of a small amount of particulate matter dispersed in a continuous fluid phase.