  We investigate freely expanding sheets formed by ultrasoft gel beads, and
liquid and viscoelastic drops, produced by the impact of the bead or drop on a
silicon wafer covered with a thin layer of liquid nitrogen that suppresses
viscous dissipation thanks to an inverse Leidenfrost effect. Our experiments
show a unified behaviour for the impact dynamics that holds for solids,
liquids, and viscoelastic fluids and that we rationalize by properly taking
into account elastocapillary effects. In this framework, the classical impact
dynamics of solids and liquids as far as viscous dissipation is negligible,
appears as the asymptotic limits of a universal theoretical description. A
novel material-dependent characteristic velocity that includes both capillary
and bulk elasticity emerges from this unified description of the physics of
impact.
