Related papers: Viewing Earth's surface as a soft matter landscape

Ferrofluids are liquids exhibiting remarkably strong response to magnetic fields, which leads to fascinating properties useful in various applications. Understanding the wetting properties and spreading of ferrofluids is important for their…

Erosion by flowing water is one of the major forces shaping the surface of Earth. Studies in the last decade have shown, in particular, that the drainage region of rivers, where water is collected, exhibits scale invariant features…

Seismic and geodynamic studies indicate that the boundary between the Earth's liquid outer core and solid mantle is not spherical, but is likely characterized by topography in the form of inverted mountains and valleys that have typical…

Cosmological observations have revealed the existence of a dark matter sector, which is commonly assumed to be made up of one particle species only. However, this sector might be more complicated than we currently believe: there might be…

It is a well observed phenomenon that natural images are smooth, in the sense that nearby pixels tend to have similar values. We describe a mathematical model of images that makes no assumptions on the nature of the environment that images…

In the transition from nuclear matter to finite nuclei, complex finite-size effects which characterise open systems arise, in relation with either the nuclear surface or the bulk. In addition, the non-equilibrium character of the process,…

Liquids flowing against solid surfaces experience friction. While solid friction is familiar to anyone with a sense of touch, liquid friction is much more exotic. At macroscopic scales indeed, the assumption of inifinite friction, i.e. that…

Water near hydrophobic surfaces is like that at a liquid-vapor interface, where fluctuations in water density are substantially enhanced compared to that in bulk water. Here we use molecular simulations with specialized sampling techniques…

In this paper, we consider a system of partial differential equations modeling the evolution of a landscape. A ground surface is eroded by the flow of water over it, either by sedimentation or dilution. The system is composed by three…

The energy landscape picture is a central tool to study many-body systems. In particular, the energy landscapes of glass-forming liquids, jammed packings, constraint satisfaction problems, or neural networks contain a plethora of minima…

Lava worlds are a potential emerging population of Super-Earths that are on close-in orbits around their host stars with likely partially molten mantles. To date, few studies address the impact of magma on the observed properties of a…

It is a common point that "soft" condensed matter (like granular materials or foams) can reduce damage caused by impact or explosion. It is attributed to their ability to absorb significant energy. This is certainly the case for a…

Soft matters whose constituents are deformable are ubiquitous in nature especially in biological systems-including cells and their organelles-as well as in foams and emulsions. The capacity for deformation in these soft materials gives rise…

Flat and open universe models are considered, containing a mixture of cold matter (dust) and radiation interacting only through gravity, with the aim of studying their stability with respect to linear scalar perturbations. To this end the…

Owing to the ever-present solar wind, our vast solar system is full of plasmas. The turbulent solar wind, together with sporadic solar eruptions, introduces various space plasma processes and phenomena in the solar atmosphere all the way to…

Cities are systems with a large number of constituents and agents interacting with each other and can be considered as emblematic of complex systems. Modeling these systems is a real challenge and triggered the interest of many disciplines…

We perceive the world through images formed by scattering. The ability to interpret scattering data mathematically has opened to our scrutiny the constituents of matter, the building blocks of life, and the remotest corners of the universe.…

Snow is a porous disordered medium consisting of air and three water phases: ice, vapour and liquid. The ice phase consists of an assemblage of grains, ice matrix, initially arranged over a random load bearing skeleton. The quantitative…

The term active matter describes diverse systems, spanning macroscopic (e.g. shoals of fish and flocks of birds) to microscopic scales (e.g. migrating cells, motile bacteria and gels formed through the interaction of nanoscale molecular…

One considers geometry with the intransitive equaivalence relation. Such a geometry is a physical geometry, i.e. it is described completely by the world function, which is a half of the squared distance function. The physical geometry…