Related papers: Elastic Coulomb-levitation: why is ice so slippery…
The long-timescale behavior of adsorbed carbon monoxide on the surface of amorphous water ice is studied under dense cloud conditions by means of off-lattice, on-the-fly, kinetic Monte Carlo simula- tions. It is found that the CO mobility…
Elasticity typically refers to a material's ability to store energy, while viscosity refers to a material's tendency to dissipate it. In this review, we discuss fluids and solids for which this is not the case. These materials display…
Surface roughness emerges naturally during mechanical removal of material, fracture, chemical deposition, plastic deformation, indentation, and other processes. Here, we use continuum simulations to show how roughness which is neither…
When a rigid object approaches a soft material in a viscous fluid, hydrodynamic stresses arise in the lubricated contact region and deform the soft material. The elastic deformation modifies in turn the flow, hence generating a…
We theoretically predict that the motion of a polar crystalline layer between two graphene planes exerts Coulomb drag on electrons in graphene, inducing a DC drag current. The physical mechanism underlying this drag arises from intervalley…
The slipperiness of ice is an everyday-life phenomenon which, surprisingly, remains controversial despite a long scientific history. The very small friction measured on ice is classically attributed to the presence of a thin…
We analyze the behavior of a suspension of active polar particles under shear. In the absence of external forces, orientationally ordered active particles are known to exhibit a transition to a state of non-uniform polarization and…
Lubrication flows appear in many applications in engineering, biophysics, and in nature. Separation of surfaces and minimisation of friction and wear is achieved when the lubrication fluid builds up a lift force. In this paper we analyse…
If quenched fast enough, a liquid is able to avoid crystallization and will remain in a metastable supercooled state down to the glass transition, with an important increase in viscosity upon further cooling. There are important differences…
It is shown how the combination of atomic deposition and nonlinear diffusion may lead, below a critical temperature, to the growth of nonuniform layers on a substrate. The dynamics of such a system is of the Cahn-Hilliard type, supplemented…
Methods for controlling the motion of single particles, optically levitated in vacuum, have developed rapidly in recent years. The technique of cold damping makes use of feedback-controlled, electrostatic forces to increase dissipation…
We consider cold polar molecules confined in a helical optical lattice similar to those used in holographic microfabrication. An external electric field polarizes molecules along the axis of the helix. The large-distance inter-molecular…
We create a one-dimensional photonic crystal with strong polarization dependence and tunable by an applied electric field. We accomplish this in a planar microcavity by embedding a cholesteric liquid crystal (LC), which spontaneously forms…
We investigate how obliquity affects stratospheric humidity using a 3D general circulation model and find the stratosphere under high obliquity could be over 3 orders of magnitude moister than under the low obliquity equivalent, even with…
Capillary forces acting at the surface of a liquid drop can be strong enough to deform small objects and recent studies have provided several examples of elastic instabilities induced by surface tension. We present such an example where a…
The ice surface is known for presenting a very small kinetic friction coefficient, but the origin of this property remains highly controversial to date. In this work, we revisit recent computer simulations of ice sliding on atomically…
It is known by now that amorphous solids at zero temperature do not possess a nonlinear elasticity theory: besides the shear modulus which exists, all the higher order coefficients do not exist in the thermodynamic limit. Here we show that…
We consider some basic principles of fluid-induced lubrication at soft interfaces. In particular, we show how the presence of a soft substrate leads to an increase in the physical separation between surfaces sliding past each other. By…
Collisions of ice particles play an important role in the formation of planetesimals and comets. In recent work we showed, that CO$_2$ ice behaves like silicates in collisions. The resulting assumption was that it should therefore stick…
Crystallography typically studies collections of point particles whose interaction forces are the gradient of a potential. Lifting this assumption generically gives rise in the continuum limit to a form of elasticity with additional moduli…