Inertial Microcavitation in Soft Matter*

The last two decades have seen significant advances in the manufacturing and design of soft matter materials with tunable control across orders of magnitude in length scale and elastic modulus. Characterization of the mechanical behavior of this new class of emerging complex soft materials has been challenging, especially in the inertial regime at strain rates beyond 100/s.
In this talk I will present an overview of how inertial microcavitation can be exploited to mechanically characterize soft matter at high and ultra-high strain rates (i.e., 10² – 10⁸ 1/s) using inertial microcavitation rheometry (IMR). Specifically, I will show how such an approach that features both rigorous experimental and theoretical advances, can be leveraged to inform about the time and length-scale dependent material behavior of complex soft matter.