Related papers: Local structure controls shear and bulk moduli in …

We construct a new order parameter from the normal modes of vibration, based on the consideration of energy equipartition, to quantify the structural heterogeneity in disordered solids. The order parameter exhibits strong spatial…

Local positional disorder in soft, anharmonic materials has emerged as a central factor in shaping their electronic, vibrational, optical, and transport properties. Viewed mainly as a source of performance degradation, recent theoretical…

External stress can accelerate molecular mobility of amorphous solids by several orders of magnitude. The changes in mobility are commonly interpreted through the Eyring model, which invokes an empirical activation volume whose origin…

Granular materials show inhomogeneous flows characterized by strain localization. When strain is localized in a sheared granular material, rigid regions of a nearly undeformed state are separated by shear bands, where the material yields…

The onset of irreversible deformation in low-temperature amorphous solids is due to the accumulation of elementary events, consisting of spacially and temporally localized atomic rearrangements involving only a few tens of atoms. Recently,…

We investigate the shear elastic modulus of soft polymer foams loaded with hard spherical particles and we show that, for constant bubble size and gas volume fraction, strengthening is strongly dependent on the size of those inclusions.…

Unilateral interparticle interactions have an effect on the elastic response of granular materials due to the opening and closing of contacts during quasi-static shear deformations. A simplified model is presented, for which constitutive…

The common notion suggests that metallic glasses (MGs) are a homogeneous solid at the macroscopic scale; however, recent experiments and simulations indicate that MGs contain nano-scale elastic heterogeneities. Despite the fundamental…

Many biological processes are supported by special molecules, called motor proteins or molecular motors, that transport cellular cargoes along linear protein filaments and can reversibly associate to their tracks. Stimulated by these…

Jamming is a phenomenon shared by a wide variety of systems, such as granular materials, foams, and glasses in their high density regime. This has motivated the development of a theoretical framework capable of explaining many of their…

Dense suspensions of deformable particles can exhibit rich nonequilibrium dynamics arising from complex flow-structure coupling. Using a multi-phase field model, we show that steady shear drives an initially disordered, dense, soft…

We study the relationship between the granular contact angle distribution and local particle friction on the macroscopic friction and bulk modulus in non-cohesive disk packings. Molecular dynamics in two dimensions are used to simulate…

Tightly packed granular particles under shear often exhibit intriguing intermittencies, specifically, sudden stress drops that we refer to as quaking. To probe the nature of this phenomenon, we prototype a circular shear cell that is…

We investigate the weakening of elastic materials through randomly distributed circles and cracks numerically and compare the results to predictions from homogenization theories. We find a good agreement for the case of randomly oriented…

Dynamic experiments with Al-W granular/porous composites revealed qualitatively different behavior with respect to shear localization depending on bonding between Al particles. Two-dimensional numerical modeling was used to explore the…

We introduce a mesoscopic model for the formation and evolution of shear bands in loose granular media. Numerical simulations reveal that the system undergoes a non-trivial self-organization process which is governed by the motion of the…

The emergence of macroscopic order and patterns is a central paradigm in systems of (self-)propelled agents, and a key component in the structuring of many biological systems.The relationships between the ordering process and the underlying…

The structure, thermodynamics and slow activated dynamics of the equilibrated metastable regime of glass-forming fluids remains a poorly understood problem of high theoretical and experimental interest. We apply a highly accurate…

Exact solutions are derived for the problem of a two-dimensional, infinitely anisotropic, linear-elastic medium containing a periodic lattice of voids. The matrix material possesses either one infinitely soft, or one infinitely hard loading…

We examine how disordering joint position influences the linear elastic behavior of lattice materials via numerical simulations in two-dimensional beam networks. Three distinct initial crystalline geometries are selected as representative…