Related papers: Viewing Earth's surface as a soft matter landscape
Buoyancy effects in unstably stratified mixing layers express themselves through gravity currents of heavy fluid which propagate in an ambient lighter fluid. These currents are encountered in numerous geophysical flows, industrial safety…
One primary reason for the formulation of the term Earth-like planet and the search for such planets in the galaxy is because life has arisen in such a world. Thus, this search seems justifiable as it is known here what one is looking for.…
(Abridged) Present cosmological constraints and the absence of a direct detection and identification of any dark matter particle candidate leave room to the possibility that the dark sector of the Universe be actually more complex than it…
Clouds seem like an every-day experience. But -- do we know how clouds form on brown dwarfs and extra-solar planets? How do they look like? Can we see them? What are they composed of? Cloud formation is an old-fashioned but still…
The ability of soft matter such as drops and bubbles to change shape dynamically during interaction can give rise to counter-intuitive behaviour that may be expected of rigid materials. Here we show that dimple formation on approach and the…
The simplicity of hard spheres as a model system is deceptive. Although the particles interact solely through volume exclusion, that nevertheless suffices for a wealth of static and dynamical phenomena to emerge, making the model an…
Developable surfaces are commonly observed in various applications such as architecture, product design, manufacturing, mechanical materials, and data physicalization as well as in the development of tangible interaction and deformable…
Polyhedral surfaces are fundamental objects in architectural geometry and industrial design. Whereas closeness of a given mesh to a smooth reference surface and its suitability for numerical simulations were already studied extensively, the…
Hard-sphere models exhibit many of the same kinds of supercooled-liquid behavior as more realistic models of liquids, but the highly non-analytic character of their potentials makes it a challenge to think of that behavior in…
What is the best way to divide a rugged landscape? Since ancient times, watersheds separating adjacent water systems that flow, for example, toward different seas, have been used to delimit boundaries. Interestingly, serious and even tense…
Gravity currents are a ubiquitous density driven flow occurring in both the natural environment and in industry. They include: seafloor turbidity currents, primary vectors of sediment, nutrient and pollutant transport; cold fronts; and…
Wetting phenomena plays an interesting role in the technological development of materials. Recently, much attention has been directed to the study of magnetic solid films. To understand, theoretically, the effect of surface on wetting and…
Interactions with ordinary matter of a flux of high-speed uncharged dark matter particles pervasively present in space are examined. In this model, we find that the property of matter that we designate as mass becomes a measure of the…
The accumulation of dark matter near the Earth is considered. We analyze the case of long range interaction forces. Additional density of the dark matter at the Earth's surface is calculated. We show that this density exceeds the mean…
A complete understanding of the precipitous onset of slow dynamics in systems such as supercooled liquids requires making direct connections between dynamics and the underlying potential energy landscape. With the aid of a switch in…
We investigate the sliding of objects on an inclined granular surface close to the avalanche threshold. Our experiments show that the stability is driven by the surface deformations. Heavy objects generate footprint-like deformations which…
Earth's interior, I posit, is like one of the rare, oxygen-starved "enstatite chondrite" meteorites (and unlike a more-oxidized "ordinary chondrite" as has been believed for seventy years). Laboratory-analyzed enstatite-chondrite samples…
Minimal surface problems arise naturally in many soft matter systems whose free energies are dominated by surface or interface energies. Of particular interest are the shapes, stability and mechanical stresses of minimal surfaces spanning…
A reliable understanding of the Earth system is essential for the life quality of modern society. Natural hazards are the cause of most life and resource losses. The ability to define the conditions for a sustainable development of…
In the free energy landscape picture of glassy systems, the slow dynamics characteristic of these systems is believed to be due to the existence of a complicated free-energy landscape with many local minima. We show here that for a…