Related papers: Elastic moduli fluctuations predict wave attenuati…
We determine the elastic moduli of two-dimensional assemblies of disks by computer simulations. The disks interact through elastic contact forces, that oppose the relative displacement at the contact points by means of a normal and a…
Some facets of the way sound waves travel through glasses are still unclear. Recent works have shown that in the low-temperature harmonic limit a crucial role in controlling sound damping is played by local elastic heterogeneity. Sound…
We test a hypothesis for the origin of dynamical heterogeneity in slowly relaxing systems, namely that it emerges from soft (Goldstone) modes associated with a broken continuous symmetry under time reparametrizations. We do this by…
The low-temperature thermal properties of dielectric crystals are governed by acoustic excitations with large wavelengths that are well described by plane waves. This is the Debye model, which rests on the assumption that the medium is an…
The anelastic spectra (elastic energy loss and dynamic modulus versus temperature) of La1-xCaxMnO3 have been measured for 0.33< x < 0.5. A peak in the imaginary part of the elastic susceptibility is found slightly below the Curie…
We review a new theory of viscoelasticity of a glass-forming viscous liquid near and below the glass transition. In our model we assume that each point in the material has a specific viscosity, which varies randomly in space according to a…
We have developed a new technique to measure viscoelasticity in soft materials such as polymer solutions, by monitoring thermal fluctuations of embedded probe particles using laser interferometry in a microscope. Interferometry allows us to…
We describe a high-resolution, high-bandwidth technique for determining the local viscoelasticity of soft materials such as polymer gels. Loss and storage shear moduli are determined from the power spectra of thermal fluctuations of…
Recent progress on studies of the nanoscale mechanical responses in disordered systems has highlighted a strong degree of heterogeneity in the elastic moduli. In this contribution, using computer simulations, we study the elastic…
We investigate the effect of thermal fluctuations on the mechanical properties of nanotubes by employing tools from statistical physics. For 2D sheets it was previously shown that thermal fluctuations effectively renormalize elastic moduli…
Some aspects of how sound waves travel through disordered solids are still unclear. Recent work has characterized a feature of disordered solids which seems to influence vibrational excitations at the mesoscales, local elastic…
Glasses and gels, widely encountered amorphous solids with diverse industrial and everyday applications, share intriguing similarities such as rigidity without crystalline order and dynamic slowing down during aging. However, the underlying…
The normal modes of a continuum solid endowed with a random distribution of line defects that behave like elastic strings are described. These strings interact with elastic waves in the bulk, generating wave dispersion and attenuation. As…
Excess of probabilities of elastic processes over inelastic ones is a characteristic feature of the chaotic resonance scattering predicted by the random matrix theory (RMT). Quantitatively, this phenomenon is characterized by the elastic…
Recently there has been a surge in interest in using video-microscopy techniques to infer the local mechanical properties of disordered solids. One common approach is to minimize the difference between particle vibrational displacements in…
We investigate by means of molecular dynamics simulation a coarse-grained polymer glass model focusing on (quasi-static and dynamical) shear-stress fluctuations as a function of temperature T and sampling time $\Delta t$. The linear…
We consider the contribution to the density of vibrational states and the distribution of energy barrier heights of incipient instabilities in a glass modeled by a jammed packing of spheres. On approaching an instability, the frequency of a…
The vibrational anomalies of glasses, in particular the boson peak, are addressed from the standpoint of heterogeneous elasticity, namely the spatial fluctuations of elastic constants caused by the structural disorder of the amorphous…
We explore how thermal fluctuations affect the mechanics of thin amorphous spherical shells. In flat membranes with a shear modulus, thermal fluctuations increase the bending rigidity and reduce the in-plane elastic moduli in a…
We summarize the salient features of our theory of non-phononic vibrational excitations in glasses [W. Schirmacher et al., Nature Comm. 15, 3107 (2024)]. Next, we provide further evidence of the non-universality of the $\omega^4$ scaling of…