Related papers: Vibrational modes identify soft spots in a sheared…
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 study the solid-to-liquid transition in a two-dimensional fully periodic soft-glassy model with an imposed spatially heterogeneous stress. The model we consider consists of droplets of a dispersed phase jammed together in a continuous…
The phenomenology of glass-forming liquids is often described in terms of their underlying, high-dimensional potential energy surface. In particular, the statistics of stationary points sampled as a function of temperature provides useful…
It is well known that jammed soft materials will flow if sheared above their yield stress - think mayonnaise spread on bread - but a complete microscopic description of this seemingly sim- ple process has yet to emerge. What remains elusive…
Many soft materials, including foams, dense emulsions, micro gel bead suspensions, star polymers, dense packing of surfactant onion micelles, and textured morphologies of liquid crystals, share the basic "glassy" features of structural…
The dynamics of a soft sphere model glass, studied by molecular dynamics, is investigated. The vibrational density of states divided by $\omega^2$ shows a pronounced boson peak. Its shape is in agreement with the universal form derived for…
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…
We propose a dynamical theory of low-temperature shear deformation in amorphous solids. Our analysis is based on molecular-dynamics simulations of a two-dimensional, two-component noncrystalline system. These numerical simulations reveal…
We present results on a series of 2D atomistic computer simulations of amorphous systems subjected to simple shear in the athermal, quasistatic limit. The athermal quasistatic trajectories are shown to separate into smooth, reversible…
The proliferation of turbulence in subcritical wall-bounded shear flows involves spatially localised coherent structures. Turbulent spots correspond to finite-time nonlinear responses to pointwise disturbances and are regarded as seeds of…
Periodic fluidization of solids in a gas medium can generate structured bubbling patterns. This phenomenon has been successfully reproduced in fluidized bed systems called pulsed-fluidized beds, known for their efficient mixing and…
Granular materials can fail through spontaneous events like earthquakes or brittle fracture. However, measurements and analytic models which forecast failure in this class of materials, while of both fundamental and practical interest,…
Low-frequency vibrational modes play a central role in determining various basic properties of glasses, yet their statistical and mechanical properties are not fully understood. Using extensive numerical simulations of several model glasses…
The excess low-frequency normal modes for two widely-used models of glasses were studied at zero temperature. The onset frequencies for the anomalous modes for both systems agree well with predictions of a variational argument, which is…
Two models involving particles moving by ``hopping'' in disordered media are investigated: I) A model glass-forming liquid is investigated by molecular dynamics under (pseudo-) equilibrium conditions. ``Standard'' results such as mean…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
We compare the harmonic and anharmonic properties of the vibrational modes in 3-dimensional jammed packings of frictionless spheres interacting via repulsive, finite range potentials. A crossover frequency is apparent in the density of…
The yet virtually unexplored class of soft colloidal rods with small aspect ratio is investigated and shown to exhibit a very rich phase and dynamic behavior, spanning from liquid to nearly melt state. Instead of nematic order, these short…
The formation of periodic wrinkles in soft layered materials due to mechanical instabilities is prevalent in nature and has been proposed for use in multiple applications. However, such phenomena have been explored predominantly in…
We report new dynamical modes in confined soft granular flows, such as stochastic jetting and dripping, with no counterpart in continuum viscous fluids. The new modes emerge as a result of the propagation of the chaotic behaviour of…