Related papers: Phases of granular matter
When attempting to understand the role of disorder in condensed-matter physics, one faces severe experimental and theoretical difficulties and many questions are still open. Two of the most challenging ones, which have been debated for…
Colloidal systems offer the ideal conditions to study the nucleation process, both from an experimental viewpoint, due to their relative large size and long time-scales, and from a modeling point of view, due to the tunability of their…
A new class of pattern forming systems is identified and investigated: anisotropic systems that are spatially inhomogeneous along the direction perpendicular to the preferred one. By studying the generic amplitude equation of this new class…
The equation of state of nuclear matter suggests that at suitable beam energies the disassembling hot system formed in heavy ion collisions will pass through a liquid-gas coexistence region. Searching for the signatures of the phase…
Dynamical density functional simulations reveal structural aspects of crystal nucleation in undercooled liquids: the first appearing solid is amorphous, which promotes the nucleation of bcc crystals, but suppresses the appearance of the fcc…
Nucleation is an activated process in which the system has to overcome a free energy barrier in order for a first-order phase transition between the metastable and the stable phases to take place. In the liquid-to-solid transition the…
Liquid crystals have attracted enormous interest because of the variety of their phases and richness of their application. The interplay of general physical symmetries and specific molecular features generates a myriad of different…
The static as well as the dynamic behaviour of granular material are determined by dynamic {\it and} static friction. There are well known methods to include static friction in molecular dynamics simulations using scarcely understood…
Studies of disordered heterogeneous media and galaxy cosmology share a common goal: analyzing the distribution of particles at `microscales' to predict physical properties at `macroscales', whether for a liquid, composite material, or…
The steady-state homogeneous vapor-to-liquid nucleation and the succeeding liquid droplet growth process are studied for water system by means of the coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations with the mW-model suggested originally in…
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,…
Materials with nanoscale phase separation are considered. These materials are formed by a mixture of several phases, so that inside one phase there exist nanosize inclusions of other phases, with random shapes and random spatial locations.…
We perform experiments with a granular system that consists of a collection of identical hollow spheres (ping-pong balls). Particles rest on a horizontal metallic grid and are confined within a circular region. Fluidization is achieved by…
The statistical-physical study of granular matter is essential to understand, from a fundamental point of view, the many different phenomena emerging in these classical many-body systems. Under rapid-flow conditions, granular materials…
Nucleation and growth is the dominant relaxation mechanism driving first order phase transitions. In two-dimensional at systems nucleation has been applied to a wide range of problems in physics, chemistry and biology. Here we study…
Motivated by inflation, the theory of big-bang nucleosynthesis and the quest for a deeper understanding of the fundamental forces and particles, a very successful paradigm for the development of structure in the Universe has evolved. It…
Labyrinthine patterns arise in two-dimensional physical systems submitted to competing interactions, ranging from the fields of solid-state physics to hydrodynamics. For systems of interacting particles, labyrinthine and stripe phases were…
We study the dynamics of small fluctuations about the uniform state of a crystal moving through a dissipative medium, e.g. a sedimenting colloidal crystal or a moving flux lattice, using a set of continuum equations for the displacement…
Long-term quantum coherence constitutes one of the main challenges when engineering quantum devices. However, easily accessible means to quantify complex decoherence mechanisms are not readily available, nor are sufficiently stable systems.…
Understanding the physics of supercooled liquids near glassy transition remains one of the major challenges in condensed matter science. There has been long recognized that supercooled liquids have spatially dynamical heterogeneity whose…