Related papers: Edges control clustering in levitated granular mat…
We study the spontaneous motion, binary collisions, and collective dynamics of "polar disks", i.e. purpose-built particles which, when vibrated between two horizontal plates, move coherently along a direction strongly correlated to their…
We review recent developments in size separation in vibrated granular materials. Motivated by a need in industry to efficiently handle granular materials and a desire to make fundamental advances in non-equilibrium physics, experimental and…
Elastic sheets with macroscopic dimensions are easy to deform by bending and stretching. Yet shaping nanometric sheets by mechanical manipulation is hard. Here we show that nanoparticle self-assembly could be used to this end. We…
We investigate the segregation of a dense binary mixture of granular particles that only differ in their restitution coefficient. The mixture is vertically vibrated in the presence of gravity. We find a partial segregation of the species,…
Despite many advantages associated with the use of spherical particles, in practice, non-spherical particles are the main ingredient in sintering-based processing techniques, like selective-laser-sintering, where their shape and surface…
Granular materials often present correlations between particle size and shape due to their geological formation and mechanisms of weathering and fragmentation. It is known that particle shape strongly affects shear strength. However, the…
We introduce a novel model for active particles with short-range aligning interactions and study their behaviour in crowded environments using numerical simulations. When only active particles are present, we observe a transition from a…
We present a systematic overview of granular deposits composed of ellipsoidal particles with different particle shapes and size polydispersities. We study the density and anisotropy of such deposits as functions of size polydispersity and…
Massive clusters are now seen to form easily in interacting and merging galaxies, making these excellent environments for studying the properties of young clusters. New observations of the Antennae (NGC 4038/39) show that the most luminous…
In inertial microfluidics lift forces cause a particle to migrate across streamlines to specific positions in the cross section of a microchannel. We control the rotational motion of a particle and demonstrate that this allows to manipulate…
We find exact conditions for the enhancement or suppression of internal and/or scattered fields and the determination of their spatial distribution or angular momentum through the combination of simple fields. The incident fields can be…
Dust emission mechanisms as one aspect of wind-driven particle motion on planetary surfaces are still poorly understood. The microphysics is important though as it determines dust sizes and morphologies which set sedimentation speeds and…
Packing problems, which ask how to arrange a collection of objects in space to meet certain criteria, are important in a great many physical and biological systems, where geometrical arrangements at small scales control behaviour at larger…
We study the formation and growth of equilibrium clusters in a suspension of weakly-charged colloidal particles and small non-adsorbing polymers. The effective potential is characterised by a short-range attraction and a long-range…
The ability to engineer cavity-mediated interactions has emerged as a powerful tool for the generation of non-local correlations and the investigation of non-equilibrium phenomena in many-body systems. Levitated optomechanical systems have…
The high-density environment of galaxy clusters is ripe for collisional encounters of galaxies. While the large velocity dispersion of clusters was originally thought to preclude slow encounters, the infall of smaller groups into the…
We simulate a two dimensional model of self-propelled particles confined by a deformable boundary. The particles tend to accumulate near the boundary and the shape of the boundary deforms upon the collisions. We find that there are two…
We study an experimental system of hard granular squares in two dimensions, energized by vibration. The interplay of order in the orientations and positions of anisotropic particles allows for a rich set of phases. We measure the structure…
The gravitational clustering of collisionless particles in an expanding universe is modelled using some simple physical ideas. I show that it is possible to understand the nonlinear clustering in terms of three well defined regimes: (1)…
We investigate dynamics of deformable self-propelled particles with a repulsive interaction whose magnitude depends on the relative direction of elongation of a pair of particles. A collective motion of the particles appears in two…