Related papers: Granular packing as model glass formers

Glass transition is accompanied by a rapid growth of the structural relaxation time and a concomitant decrease of configurational entropy. It remains unclear whether the transition has a thermodynamic origin, and whether the dynamic arrest…

The transition from a flowing to a static state in a granular material is studied using large-scale, 3D particle simulations. Similar to glasses, this transition is manifested in the development of a plateau in the contact normal force…

Glasses are ubiquitous in daily life and technology. However the microscopic mechanisms generating this state of matter remain subject to debate: Glasses are considered either as merely hyper-viscous liquids or as resulting from a genuine…

Granulate physics has made considerable progress during the past decades in the understanding of static and dynamic properties of large ensembles of interacting macroscopic particles, including the modeling of phenomena like jamming,…

The glass problem is notoriously hard and controversial. Even at the mean-field level, little is agreed about how a fluid turns sluggish while exhibiting but unremarkable structural changes. It is clear, however, that the process involves…

We highlight certain key achievements in experimental work on molecular, colloidal and granular glassformers. This short review considers these three classes of experimental systems and focusses largely on the work of the authors and their…

Granular media such as sand and sugar are ubiquitous in nature and industry but are less well understood than fluids or solids. We consider the behavior of rapid granular flows where the transfer of momenta by collisions dominates. The…

This key-issues review is a plea for a new focus on simpler and more realistic models of glass-forming fluids. It seems to me that we have too often been led astray by sophisticated mathematical models that beautifully capture some of the…

Lattice molecule models are proposed in order to study statistical mechanics of glass transition in finite dimensions. Molecules in the models are represented by hard Wang tiles and their density is controlled by a chemical potential. An…

Granular crystallisation is an important phenomenon whereby ordered packing structures form in granular matter under vibration. However, compared with the well-developed principles of crystallisation at the atomic scale, crystallisation in…

Due to the lack of long-range order, it remains challenging to characterize the structure of disordered solids and understand the nature of the glass transition. Here we propose a new structural order parameter by taking into account…

We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…

In two-dimensional rotating drum experiments, we find two separate influences of the packing fraction of a granular heap on its stability. For a fixed grain shape, the stability increases with packing fraction. However, in determining the…

We use computer simulations to investigate the static properties of a simple glass-forming fluid in which the positions of a finite fraction of the particles has been frozen in. By probing the equilibrium distribution of the overlap between…

Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…

The phase behavior of helical packings of thermoresponsive microspheres inside glass capillaries is studied as a function of volume fraction. Stable packings with long-range orientational order appear to evolve abruptly to disordered states…

Granular fronts are a common yet unexplained phenomenon emerging during the gravity driven free-surface flow of concentrated suspensions. They are usually believed to be the result of fluid convection in combination with particle size…

Motivated by a recently identified severe discrepancy between a static and a dynamic theory of glasses, we numerically investigate the behavior of dense hard spheres in spatial dimensions 3 to 12. Our results are consistent with the static…

Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic…

Metallic glasses possess outstanding mechanical and physical properties, making them promising candidates for advanced structural and functional applications; however, the lack of understanding and control over their glass transition and…