Related papers: Phases of granular matter
Nucleation phenomena commonly observed in our every day life are of fundamental, technological and societal importance in many areas, but some of their most intimate mechanisms remain however to be unravelled. Crystal nucleation, the early…
We introduce a general formalism to analyze nucleation phenomena in inhomogeneous media which considers the influence of the metastable phase, which is treated as a heat bath in which clusters are embedded, in the dynamics of the nucleation…
The ordering dynamics of the Higgs field is studied, using techniques inspired by the study of phase ordering in condensed matter physics, as a first step to understanding the evolution of cosmic structure through the formation of…
In 1989, Sir Sam Edwards made the visionary proposition to treat jammed granular materials using a volume ensemble of equiprobable jammed states in analogy to thermal equilibrium statistical mechanics, despite their inherent athermal…
Low-density neutron matter has been studied extensively for many decades, with a view to better understanding the properties of neutron-star crusts and neutron-rich nuclei. Neutron matter is beyond experimental control, but in the past…
The properties of excited nuclear matter and the quest for a phase transition which is expected to exist in this system are the subject of intensive investigations. High energy nuclear collisions between finite nuclei which lead to matter…
The homotopy theory of topological defects is a powerful tool for organizing and unifying many ideas across a broad range of physical systems. Recently, experimental progress has been made in controlling and measuring colloidal inclusions…
Nucleation in systems with a metastable liquid-gas critical point is the prototypical example of a two-step nucleation process, in which the appearance of the critical nucleus is preceded by the formation of a liquid-like density…
We report the observation of the homogenous nucleation of crystals in a dense layer of steel spheres confined between two horizontal plates vibrated vertically. Above a critical vibration amplitude, two-layer crystals with square symmetry…
Heterogeneous nucleation is central to many familiar first-order phase transitions such as the freezing of water and the solidification of metals, and it can also play a crucial role in cosmology. We examine nucleation seeded by preexisting…
This paper reviews the new highly interdisciplinary research field studying the behavior of condensed matter systems exposed to radiation. The paper highlights several relevant examples of recent advances in the field and provides a roadmap…
Topological defects are thought to be left behind by the cosmological phase transitions which occur as the universe expands and cools. Similar processes can be studied in the phase transitions which take place in the laboratory:…
Granular fluids consist of collections of activated mesoscopic or macroscopic particles (e.g., powders or grains) whose flows often appear similar to those of normal fluids. To explore the qualitative and quantitative description of these…
Colloidal gels constitute an important class of materials found in many contexts and with a wide range of applications. Yet as matter far from equilibrium, gels exhibit a variety of time-dependent behaviours, which can be perplexing, such…
It is well known that the classical energetically consistent micropolar model has limits in simulating the frequency band structure of packed granular materials (see Merkel et al., 2011). It is here shown that if a standard continualization…
We investigate a phase-field-crystal model for homogeneous nucleation. Instead of solving the time evolution of a density field towards equilibrium we use a String Method to identify saddle points in phase space. The saddle points allow to…
We develop coarse-grained particle approaches for studying the elastic mechanics of vesicles with heterogeneous membranes having phase-separated domains. We perform simulations both of passive shape fluctuations and of active systems where…
The development of high-resolution imaging methods such as electron and scanning probe microscopy and atomic probe tomography have provided a wealth of information on structure and functionalities of solids. The availability of this data in…
Nuclear matter at large number of colors is necessarily in a solid phase. In particular holographic nuclear matter takes the form of a crystal of instantons of the flavor group. In this article we initiate the analysis of the…
A new type of two phase coexistence in a vibrated granular material is reported, in the limit where energy transfer between the particles and the bottom wall occurs due to discrete collisions. A horizontally homogeneous bed develops…