Related papers: The cat's cradle, stirring, and topological comple…
Entanglement entropies have revealed, in the last years, to be a powerful tool to extract information about the physics of condensed-matter systems. In the first part of this thesis, we show how to extract essential details about the…
Elucidating the physics of a concentrated suspension of ring polymers, or of an ensemble of ring polymers in a complex environment, is an important outstanding question in polymer physics. Many of the characteristic features of these…
It is argued that quantum gravity has an interpretation as a topological field theory provided a certain constraint from the path intergral measure is respected. The constraint forces us to couple gauge and matter fields to gravity for…
We reappraise the idea of colliding with robots, moving from a position that tries to avoid or mitigate collisions to one that considers them an important facet of human interaction. We report on a soma design workshop that explored how our…
Quantum circuit complexity has played a central role in recent advances in holography and many-body physics. Within quantum field theory, it has typically been studied in a Lorentzian (real-time) framework. In a departure from standard…
We find that circular kinks form on the surface of granular material when the axis of rotation is tilted more than the angle of internal friction of the material. Radius of the kinks is measured as a function of the spinning speed and the…
We study formation and evolution of solitons within a model with two real scalar fields with the potential having a saddle point. The set of these configurations can be split into disjoint equivalence classes. We give a simple expression…
The role of topology in elementary quantum physics is discussed in detail. It is argued that attributes of classical spatial topology emerge from properties of state vectors with suitably smooth time evolution. Equivalently, they emerge…
Chirality is a recurrent theme in the study of biological systems, in which active processes are driven by the internal conversion of chemical energy into work. Bacterial flagella, acto-myosin filaments and microtubule bundles are active…
A translation surface is a surface formed by identifying edges of a collection of polygons in the complex plane that are parallel and of equal length using only translations. We determined that the same circle packing can be realized on…
Consider a deformable body immersed in an incompressible liquid that is randomly stirred. Sticking to physical situations in which the body departs only slightly from its spherical shape, we investigate the motion of the body, calculate its…
A non-slip constraint between a particle and a wall is applied at the microscopic level of collision dynamics using the rough sphere model. We analyse the consequences of the translation-rotation coupling of the rough sphere confined…
We consider steady gravity-driven flow of a thin layer of viscous fluid over a curved substrate. The substrate has topographical variations (`bumps') on a large scale compared to the layer thickness. Using lubrication theory, we find the…
We examine the various linkings in space-time of ``ball-like'' and ``ring-like'' topological solitons in certain nonlinear sigma models in 2+1 and 3+1 dimensions. By going to theories where soliton overlaps are forbidden, these linkings…
We study the topological dynamics by iterations of a piecewise continuous, non linear and locally contractive map in a real finite dimensional compact ball. We consider those maps satisfying the "separation property": different continuity…
Consider the three-dimensional flow of a viscous Newtonian fluid upon an abitrarily curved substrate when the fluid film is thin as occurs in many draining, coating and biological flows. We derive a model of the dynamics of the film, the…
Many systems in nature and the synthetic world involve ordered arrangements of units on two-dimensional surfaces. We review here the fundamental role payed by both the topology of the underlying surface and its detailed curvature. Topology…
We consider a system of particles which interact through a jump process. The jump intensities are functions of the proximity rank of the particles, a type of interaction referred to as topological in the literature. Such interactions have…
We analyze a real one-parameter family of quasiconformal deformations of a hyperbolic rational map known as {\em spinning}. We show that under fairly general hypotheses, the limit of spinning either exists and is unique, or else converges…
In piecewise-smooth differential systems, a hyperbolic limit cycle of a subsystem loses its structural stability if it grazes the switching manifold at a tangent point. Such a cycle is called a grazing loop and in this paper we investigate…