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Motivated by bouncing motion of an inelastic particle on a vibrating board, a simple two-dimensional map is constructed and its behavior is studied numerically. In addition to the typical route to chaos through a periodic doubling…
In this paper, we consider a mass-spring-friction oscillator with the friction modelled by a regularized stiction model in the limit where the ratio of the natural spring frequency and the forcing frequency is on the same order of magnitude…
Friction is a complex phenomenon that is of paramount importance in everyday life. We present an easy-to-build and inexpensive experiment illustrating Coulomb's law of kinetic friction. The so-called friction, or Timoshenko, oscillator…
Athermal disordered systems can exhibit a remarkable response to an applied oscillatory shear: after a relatively few shearing cycles, the system falls into a configuration that had already been visited in a previous cycle. After this point…
Turbulence is hard to control. A plethora of experimental methods have been developed to generate this ephemeral state of matter, leading to fundamental insights into its statistical and structural features as well as its onset at ever…
We study experimentally the motion of an intruder dragged into an amorphous monolayer of horizontally vibrated grains at high packing fractions. This motion exhibits two transitions. The first transition separates a continuous motion regime…
We study a model of rolling particles subject to stochastic fluctuations, which may be relevant in systems of nano- or micro-scale particles where rolling is an approximation for strong static friction. We consider the simplest possible…
We measure and compare the rotational and transverse velocity of a bowed string. When bowed by an experienced player, the torsional motion is phase-locked to the transverse waves, producing highly periodic motion. The spectrum of the…
We synthesized the liquid crystal dimer and trimer members of a series of flexible linear oligomers and characterized their microscopic and nanoscopic properties using resonant soft x-ray scattering and a number of other experimental…
The problem of finding the optimal tapering of a free (non-supported) javelin is described and solved. For the optimal javelin, the lowest mode of vibration has the highest possible frequency. With this tapering inner damping will lead to…
Frictional sliding is an intrinsically complex phenomenon, emerging from the interplay between driving forces, elasto-frictional instabilities, interfacial nonlinearity and dissipation, material inertia and bulk geometry. We show that…
Some phase space transport properties for a conservative bouncer model are studied. The dynamics of the model is described by using a two-dimensional measure preserving mapping for the variables velocity and time. The system is…
We study the dynamics of a dimer moving on a periodic one-dimensional substrate as a function of the initial kinetic energy at zero temperature. The aim is to describe, in a simplified picture, the microscopic dynamics of diatomic molecules…
We report on an experimental investigation of the tumbling of microrods in the shear flow of a microchannel (40 x 2.5 x 0.4 mm). The rods are 20 to 30 microns long and their diameters are of the order of 1 micron. Images of the…
Bowing a string with a non-zero radius exerts a torque, which excites torsional waves. In general, torsional standing waves have higher fundamental frequencies than do transverse standing waves, and there is generally no harmonic…
The complex interaction between turbulence and the free surface in boundary layer shear flow created by a vertical surface-piercing wall is considered. A laboratory-scale device was built that utilizes a surface-piercing stainless steel…
The vibration of the dimer on Ge(001) surface with the higher vibrational number excited coherently by STM current is theoretically investigated. The coherent excitation rate of the dimer vibration is obtained by the Hamiltonian consisting…
The sticking of a soft polystyrene colloidal particle to a planar glass plate was studied by a microrheological technique using an optical tweezer to trap the particle and a piezoelectric-stage to position the plate and to sinusoidally…
The conformational and dynamical properties of active ring polymers are studied by numerical simulations. The two-dimensionally confined polymer is modeled as a closed bead-spring chain, driven by tangential forces, put in contact with a…
We describe a simple mechanical system that operates as a ponderomotive particle trap, consisting of a circular hoop and a frictionless bead, with the hoop rotating about a horizontal axis lying in the plane of the hoop. The bead in the…