Related papers: Interplay between shear loading and structural agi…

Mechanical rejuvenation and over-aging of glasses is investigated through stochastic simulations of the soft glassy rheology (SGR) model. Strain- and stress-controlled deformation cycles for a wide range of loading conditions are analyzed…

Soft solids with tunable mechanical response are at the core of new material technologies, but a crucial limit for applications is their progressive aging over time, which dramatically affects their functionalities. The generally accepted…

We explore the compaction dynamics of a granular pile after a hard quench from a liquid into the glassy regime. First, we establish that the otherwise athermal granular pile during tapping exhibits annealing behavior comparable to glassy…

We study the aging dynamics in a model for dense simple liquids, in which particles interact through a hard-core repulsion complemented by a short-ranged attractive potential, of the kind found in colloidal suspensions. In this system, at…

Many colloidal systems display very non-Newtonian and solid-like behaviour when concentrated, a striking feature being the apparition of a yield stress. After recalling some basics about the interactions between colloidal particles, I…

Disordered solids often change their elastic response as they slowly age. Using experiments and simulations, we study how aging disordered planar networks under an applied stress affects their nonlinear elastic response. We are able to…

We study model near-critical polymer gelling systems made of gluten proteins dispersions stabilized at different distances from the gel point. We impose different shear rates and follow the time evolution of the stress. For sufficiently…

We study by light microscopy a soft glass consisting of a compact arrangement of polydisperse elastic spheres. We show that its slow and non-stationary dynamics results from the unavoidable small fluctuations of temperature, which induce…

We investigate the nonlinear rheological behavior of colloidal suspensions of Laponite, a synthetic clay, driven by a steady and homogeneous shear strain. We show that the external drive leads to a drastic slowing down of the aging dynamics…

Fatigue and aging of materials are, in large part, determined by the evolution of the atomic-scale structure in response to strains and perturbations. This coupling between microscopic structure and long time scales remains one of the main…

Natural rubber is obtained by processing natural rubber latex, a liquid colloidal suspension that rapidly gels after exudation from the tree. We prepared such gels by acidification, in a large range of particle volume fractions, and…

We observe non-monotonic aging and memory effects, two hallmarks of glassy dynamics, in two disordered mechanical systems: crumpled thin sheets and elastic foams. Under fixed compression, both systems exhibit monotonic non-exponential…

Glasses have liquid-like structure, but exhibit solid-like properties. A central question concerns the relation between the structure and mechanical properties of glasses, but structural changes remain difficult to resolve. We use a novel…

We are interested in the out of equilibrium phenomena observed in the electrical conductance of disordered insulators at low temperature, which may be signatures of the electron coulomb glass state. The present work is devoted to the…

We study the linear response to strain in a mean field elastoplastic model for athermal amorphous solids, incorporating the power-law mechanical noise spectrum arising from plastic events. In the "jammed" regime of the model, where the…

The rheological properties of highly concentrated suspensions of hard-sphere particles are studied with particular reference to the rheological response of shear induced crystals. Using practically monodisperse hard spheres, we prepare…

Repeated loading of a solid leads to microstructural damage that ultimately results in catastrophic material failure. While posing a major threat to the stability of virtually all materials, the microscopic origins of fatigue, especially…

We study the shear induced fluidization of amorphous solids subjected to external loading by investigating the relaxation dynamics of the deformed states using computer simulation. A simple shear deformation is employed at constant rate to…

We explore the origins of slow dynamics, aging and glassy rheology in soft and living matter. Non-diffusive slow dynamics and aging in materials characterised by crowding of the constituents can be explained in terms of structural…

We propose that there exists a generic class of glass forming systems that have competing states (of crystalline order or not) which are locally close in energy to the ground state (which is typically unique). Upon cooling, such systems…