Related papers: Dynamical solid-liquid transition through oscillat…
Amorphous solids display a ductile to brittle transition as the kinetic stability of the quiescent glass is increased, which leads to a material failure controlled by the sudden emergence of a macroscopic shear band in quasi-static…
A wide range of disordered materials, from biological to geological assemblies, feature discrete elements undergoing large shape changes. How significant geometrical variations at the microscopic scale affect the response of the assembly,…
The classification of structural phase transitions as displacive or order-disorder in character is usually based on spectroscopic data above the transition. We use single crystal x-ray diffraction to investigate structural correlations in…
An important aspect of the physics of amorphous solids is the onset of irreversible behavior usually associated with yield. Here we study amorphous solids under periodic shear using quasi-static molecular dynamics simulations and observe a…
Disordered solids exhibit unusual properties of their vibrational states and thermal conductivities. Recent progresses have well established the concept of "elastic heterogeneity", i.e., disordered materials show spatially inhomogeneous…
In many interesting physical settings, such as the vulcanization of rubber, the introduction of permanent random constraints between the constituents of a homogeneous fluid can cause a phase transition to a random solid state. In this…
We investigate the switching dynamics of multistable nematic liquid crystal devices. In particular we identify a remarkably simple 2-dimensional (2D) device which exploits hybrid alignment at the surfaces to yield a bistable response. We…
The deformation of an elastic micro-capsule in an infinite shear flow is studied numerically using a spectral method. The shape of the capsule and the hydrodynamic flow field are expanded into smooth basis functions. Analytic expressions…
The phase-separation process of a binary mixture with order-parameter-dependent mobility under shear flow is numerically studied. The ordering is characterized by an alternate stretching and bursting of domains which produce oscillations in…
We study dynamic self-organisation and order-disorder transitions in a two-dimensional system of self-propelled particles. Our model is a variation of the Vicsek model, where particles align the motion to their neighbours but repel each…
The process of structural relaxation in disordered solids subjected to repeated tension-compression loading is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. The binary glass is prepared by rapid cooling well below the glass transition…
Employing a recently developed dynamical density functional theory we study the response of a colloidal sediment above a wall to shear, demonstrating the time dependent changes of the density distribution and its center-of-mass after…
Under steady shear, a foam relaxes stress through intermittent rearrangements of bubbles accompanied by sudden drops in the stored elastic energy. We use a simple model of foam that incorporates both elasticity and dissipation to study the…
In a recent letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 75}, 2360 (1996)] we briefly discussed the existence and nature of ferroelectric order in positionally disordered dipolar materials. Here we report further results and give a complete description of…
We investigate a 2D dynamical absorbing state model of monodisperse disks, in which rich phase behavior arises from interactions consisting solely of repulsive displacements between overlapping particles. The phase diagram reveals several…
We study Harmonic Soft Spheres as a model of thermal structural glasses in the limit of infinite dimensions. We show that cooling, compressing and shearing a glass lead to a Gardner transition and, hence, to a marginally stable amorphous…
The nonequilibrium dynamical behaviour that arises when two ordered two-dimensional monolayers of particles are sheared over each other is studied in Brownian dynamics simulations. A curious sequence of nonequilibrium states is observed as…
We investigate the evaporation of a two-dimensional droplet on a solid surface. The solid is flat but with smooth chemical variations that lead to a space-dependent local contact angle. We perform a detailed bifurcation analysis of the…
In liquid-crystalline elastomers, the nematic order parameter and the induced strain vary smoothly across the isotropic-nematic transition, without the expected first-order discontinuity. To investigate this smooth variation, we measure the…
We report simulations of a continuum model for (apolar, flow aligning) active fluids in two dimensions. Both free and anchored boundary conditions are considered, at parallel confining walls that are either static or moving at fixed…