Related papers: Vibrational modes identify soft spots in a sheared…
Slow dynamic nonlinearity describes a poorly understood, creep-like phenomena that occurs in brittle composite materials such as rocks and cement. It is characterized by a drop in stiffness induced by a mechanical conditioning, followed by…
Atomistic simulations are employed to study structural evolution of pore ensembles in binary glasses under periodic shear deformation with varied amplitude. The consideration is given to porous systems in the limit of low porosity. The…
Shear banding and stick-slip instabilities have been long observed in sheared granular materials. Yet, their microscopic underpinnings, interdependencies and variability under different loading conditions have not been fully explored. Here,…
Normal modes provide a fundamental basis for understanding crucial properties of solids, such as the thermal conductivity, the heat capacity and the sound propagation. While the normal modes are excellently described by plane waves in…
We study a disordered vibrational model system, where the spring constants k are chosen from a distribution P(k) ~ 1/k above a cut-off value k_min > 0. We can motivate this distribution by the presence of free volume in glassy materials. We…
A hallmark of structural glasses and other disordered solids is the emergence of excess low-frequency vibrations, on top of the Debye spectrum $D_{\rm Debye}(\omega)$ of phonons ($\omega$ denotes the vibrational frequency), which exist in…
We numerically study the interplay between heterogeneous dynamics and properties of negatively curved regions of the potential energy surface in a model glassy system. We find that the unstable modes of saddles and quasi-saddles undergo a…
Amorphous solids tend to present an abundance of soft elastic modes, which diminish their transport properties, generate heterogeneities in their elastic response, and affect non-linear processes like thermal activation of plasticity. This…
Topological defects are singularities within a field that cannot be removed by continuous transformations. The definition of these irregularities requires an ordered reference configuration, calling into question whether they exist in…
Physical and chemical transformation processes in reactive granular media involve the reorganization of the structure. In this paper, we study experimentally the rearrangements of a two-dimensional (2D) granular packing undergoing a…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…
We study a disordered network of bistable bonds subjected to periodic strain. The model is inspired by experiments on crumpled sheets and it features behaviors associated with glasses, including a complex energy landscape, memories, and…
Hierarchical dynamics in glass-forming systems span multiple timescales, from fast vibrations to slow structural rearrangements, appearing in both supercooled fluids and glassy states. Understanding how these diverse processes interact…
We poorly understand the properties of amorphous systems at small length scales, where a continuous elastic description breaks down. This is apparent when one considers their vibrational and transport properties, or the way forces propagate…
The effects of thermal noise on particle rearrangements in colloidal suspensions undergoing cyclic shear are experimentally investigated using particle tracking methods. The experimental model system consists of polystyrene particles…
Structural glasses formed by quenching a melt possess a population of soft quasilocalized excitations --- often called `soft spots' --- that are believed to play a key role in various thermodynamic, transport and mechanical phenomena. Under…
Glasses are structurally liquid-like, but mechanically solid-like. Most attempts to understand glasses start from liquid state theory. Here we take the opposite point of view, and use concepts from solid state physics. We determine the…
While soft quasilocalized vibrational modes are known to populate the low-frequency spectrum of glassy solids, their contribution to thermal properties is still not fully elucidated. We numerically show that, despite their spatially…
We derive a mode-coupling theory for the slow dynamics of fluids confined in disordered porous media represented by spherical particles randomly placed in space. Its equations display the usual nonlinear structure met in this theoretical…
We consider a particle that is subject to a constant force and scatters inelastically on a vibrating periodically corrugated floor. At small friction and small radius of the circular scatterers the dynamics is dominated by resonances…