Related papers: Catastrophe machines a few nanometers in size
Hysteresis, the lag between the force and the response, is often associated with noisy, jerky motion which have recently been called ``avalanches''. The interesting question is why the avalanches come in such a variety of sizes: naively one…
Euler buckling epitomises mechanical instabilities: An inextensible straight elastic line buckles under compression when the compressive force reaches a critical value $F_\ast>0$. Here, we extend this classical, planar instability to the…
The Casimir force between uncharged metallic surfaces originates from quantum mechanical zero point fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. We demonstrate that this quantum electrodynamical effect has a profound influence on the…
Most of crystalline materials develop an hysteresis on their deformation curve when a mechanical loading is applied in alternating directions. This effect, also known as the Bauschinger effect, is intimately related to the reversibile part…
Using 9-sets of different laboratory earthquake tests, we examined the nature of cracking under true triaxial stress conditions in the lithosphere . We found that 3D stress state can induce oblique nucleation of many fractures, forming…
The Casimir effect refers to the existence of a macroscopic force between conducting plates in vacuum due to quantum fluctuations of fields. These forces play an important role, among other things, in the design of nano-scale mechanical…
Shape memory alloys that can deform and then spring back to their original shape, have found a wide range of applications in the medical field, from heart valves to stents. As we push the boundaries of technology creating smaller, more…
We consider the 3D incompressible Euler equations under the following three scale hierarchical situation: large-scale vortex stretching the middle-scale, and at the same time, the middle-scale stretching the small-scale. In this situation,…
We provide a clear energetic insight into the catastrophic nature of the so-called creasing and pull-in instabilities in soft electro-active elastomers. These phenomena are ubiquitous for thin electro-elastic plates and are a major obstacle…
An effective Hamiltonian scheme is developed to investigate structural and magnetic properties of BiFeO3 nanodots under short-circuit-like electrical boundary conditions. Various striking effects are discovered. Examples include (a) scaling…
The low energy effective action of gravity in any even dimension generally acquires non-local terms associated with the trace anomaly, generated by the quantum fluctuations of massless fields. The local auxiliary field description of this…
Breakthroughs in two-dimensional van der Waals heterostructures have revealed that twisting creates a moir\'e pattern that quenches the kinetic energy of electrons, allowing for exotic many-body states. We show that cold-atomic, trapped…
An experimental arrangement and a set of experiments are developed to generate empirical evidence of the effect of noise on a rotating, macro-scale cantilever structure. The experiment is a controlled representation of a rotating machinery…
Experiments on Micro- and Nano-mechanical systems (M/NEMS) have shown that their behavior upon bending loads departs in many cases from the classical predictions using Euler-Bernoulli theory and Hooke law. This anomalous response has…
The incredible thermo-mechanical properties of biological materials arise from the microscopic scale due to a complex hierarchical mechanism, regulated by microinstabilities at the molecular level. The description of such complex structures…
The presence of chaotic transients in a nonlinear dynamo is investigated through numerical simulations of the 3D magnetohydrodynamic equations. By using the kinetic helicity of the flow as a control parameter, a hysteretic blowout…
Nanocrystalline metals, i.e. metals in which the grain size is in the nanometer range, have a range of technologically interesting properties including increased hardness and yield strength. We present atomic-scale simulations of the…
Although well studied, our understanding of the mass ejection mechanisms of cataclysmic variables remains incomplete. Recent work suggests that binary interaction plays an important role in driving and shaping this mass ejection and may…
Recent advances in nanofluidics have enabled the confinement of water down to a single molecular layer. Such monolayer electrolytes show promise in achieving bio-inspired functionalities through molecular control of ion transport. However,…
The Casimir Effect is a physical manifestation of quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic vacuum. When two metal plates are placed closely together, typically much less than a micron, the long wavelength modes between them are frozen…