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From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
The main task of an introductory laboratory course is to foster students' manual, conceptual and statistical ability to investigate physical phenomena. Needing very simple apparatus, pendulum experiments are an ideal starting point in our…
We describe a series of experiments done using a commercially available optical pumping apparatus that is currently being used in physics teaching labs at over one hundred universities. Our focus here is to provide an extensive and detailed…
Elastomers are viscoelastic materials and their properties significantly depend on the loading rate. The actual stress experienced by these materials is the sum of equilibrium and dissipative (inelastic) terms. At very low loading rates we…
The relaxation of the specific heat and the entropy to their equilibrium values is investigated numerically for the three-dimensional Coulomb glass at very low temperatures. The long time relaxation follows a stretched exponential function,…
The configurational entropy is one of the most important thermodynamic quantities characterizing supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition. Despite decades of experimental, theoretical, and computational investigation, a widely…
An updated review [1] of nonextensive statistical mechanics and thermodynamics is colloquially presented. Quite naturally the possibility emerges for using the value of q-1 (entropic nonextensivity) as a simple and efficient manner to…
Moore and Schroeder proposed an effective approach to introducing entropy and the second law through computational study of models with easily countable states at fixed energy. But such systems are rare: the only familiar examples are the…
Whether a system is to be considered complex or not depends on how one searches for correlations. We propose a general scheme for calculation of entropies in lattice systems that has high flexibility in how correlations are successively…
In many real-world situations, there are constraints on the ways in which a physical system can be manipulated. We investigate the entropy production (EP) and extractable work involved in bringing a system from some initial distribution $p$…
Entropy is a quantity which is of great importance in physics and chemistry. The concept comes out of thermodynamics, proposed by Rudolf Clausius in his analysis of Carnot cycle and linked by Ludwig Boltzmann to the number of specific ways…
This article describes an exemplary robot exercise which was conducted in a class for mechatronics students. The goal of this exercise was to engage students in scientific thinking and reasoning, activities which do not always play an…
The phenomenon of crumpling is common in our daily life and nature. It exhibits many interesting properties, such as ultra-tough resistance to pressure with less than 30$\%$ of volume density, power-law relation for pressure vs density, and…
The classical theory of rubber elasticity fails in the regime of large deformation. The un- derlying physical mechanism has been under debate for long time. In this work, we test the recently proposed mechanism of thermal elastic…
The self- and mutual-avoiding walk used in conventional lattice models for polymeric systems requires that all lattice sites, polymer segments, and solvent molecules (unoccupied lattice sites) have the same volume. This incorrectly accounts…
Partial differential equations are ubiquitous in almost all applications of mathematics, where they provide a natural mathematical description of many phenomena involving change in physical, chemical, biological, and social processes. The…
The time variation of entropy, as an alternative to the variance, is proposed as a measure of the diffusion rate. It is shown that for linear and time-translationally invariant systems having a large-time limit for the density, at large…
We propose a systematic method based on reinforcement learning (RL) techniques to find the optimal path that can minimize the total entropy production between two equilibrium states of open systems at the same temperature in a given fixed…
Opening sterile medical packaging is routine for healthcare workers but remains challenging for robots. Learning from demonstration enables robots to acquire manipulation skills directly from humans, and handheld gripper tools such as the…
In an Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course that leverages authentic biological examples, student ideas about entropy as "disorder" or "chaos" come into contact with their ideas about the spontaneous formation of organized…