title: Many-body contact repulsion of deformable disks.
abstract: We use a spring-and-plaquette network model to analyze the repulsion between elastic disks in contact. By studying various 2D geometries, we find that as disks approach the incompressibility limit the many-body effects become dominant and the disk-disk interaction is not pairwise additive. Upon compression, the disks undergo a transition from the localized to the distributed deformation regime accompanied by a steep increase of energy consistent with the onset of a hard core. These results shed new light on the structures formed by deformable objects such as soft nanocolloids.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Physics, Bijenička cesta 46, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Šiber
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ziherl