Related papers: Replenish and relax: explaining logarithmic anneal…
The yielding transition, structural relaxation, and mechanical properties of metallic glasses subjected to repeated loading are examined using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider a poorly-annealed Cu-Zr amorphous alloy periodically…
Athermal systems across a large range of length scales, ranging from foams and granular bead packings to crumpled metallic sheets, exhibit slow stress relaxation when compressed. Experimentally they show a non-monotonic stress response when…
Motivated by the large strain shear of loose granular materials we introduced a model which consists of consecutive optimization and restructuring steps leading to a self organization of a density field. The extensive connections to other…
A computational approach is presented to obtain energy-minimized structures in glassy materials. This approach, the activation-relaxation technique (ART), achieves its efficiency by focusing on significant changes in the microscopic…
The response of many materials to applied forces and boundary constraints depends upon internal geometric changes at multiple submacroscopic levels. Hierarchical structured deformations provide a mathematical setting for the description of…
Understanding the slowest relaxations of complex systems, such as relaxation of glass-forming materials, diffusion in nanoclusters, and folding of biomolecules, is important for physics, chemistry, and biology. For a kinetic system, the…
We show that the aging of the mechanical relaxation of a gelatin gel exhibits the same scaling phenomenology as polymer and colloidal glasses. Besides, gelatin is known to exhibit logarithmic structural aging (stiffening). We find that…
Rate-independence for stresses within a granular material is a basic tenet of many models for slow dense granular flows. By contrast, logarithmic rate dependence of stresses is found in solid-on-solid friction, in geological settings, and…
Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…
When stressed sufficiently, solid materials yield and deform plastically via reorganization of microscopic constituents. Indeed, it is possible to alter the micro-structure of materials by judicious application of stress, an empirical pro-…
We have studied the approach to equilibrium of islands and pores in two dimensions. The two-regime scenario observed when islands evolve according to a set of particular rules, namely relaxation by steps at low temperature and smooth at…
We study the growing time scales and length scales associated with dynamical slow down for a realistic glass former, using computer simulations. We perform finite size scaling to evaluate a length scale associated with dynamical…
Structural relaxation in hard-sphere colloidal glasses has been studied using confocal microscopy. The motion of individual particles is followed over long time scales to detect the rearranging regions in the system. We have used normal…
We consider relaxation processes that exhibit a stretched exponential behavior. We find that in those systems, where the relaxation arises from two competing exponential processes, the size of the system may play a dominant role. Above a…
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…
Silicon presents itself as a high-capacity anode material for lithium-ion batteries with a promising future. The high ability for lithiation comes along with massive volume changes and a problematic voltage hysteresis, causing reduced…
We investigate the dissipative mechanisms exhibited by creased material sheets when subjected to mechanical loading, which comes in the form of plasticity and relaxation phenomena within the creases. After demonstrating that plasticity…
We investigate the crumpling of a sheet as it is repeatedly crushed onto itself by rolling it into a cylinder and twisting it axially while allowing the end-to-end length to evolve freely. As deduced from its plastic deformations, the sheet…
Amorphous materials driven away from equilibrium display a diverse repertoire of complex, history-dependent behaviors. One striking feature is a failure to return to equilibrium after an abrupt change in otherwise static external…
We use numerical simulations to study the dynamics of dense assemblies of self-propelled particles in the limit of extremely large, but finite, persistence times. In this limit, the system evolves intermittently between mechanical…