Related papers: Athermal Jamming vs. glassy dynamics for particles…
The concept of jamming has attracted great research interest due to its broad relevance in soft matter such as liquids, glasses, colloids, foams, and granular materials, and its deep connection to the sphere packing problem and optimization…
Aspects of the dynamical glass transition are considered within a mean field spin glass model. At the dynamical transition the the system condenses in a state of lower entropy. The difference, the information entropy or complexity, is…
Amorphous solids are ubiquitous among natural and man-made materials. Often used as structural materials for their attractive mechanical properties, their utility depends critically on their response to applied stresses. Processes…
We use computer simulations to study the glass transition of dense fluids made of polydisperse, repulsive spheres. For hard particles, we vary the volume fraction, phi, and use compressible particles to explore finite temperatures, T>0. In…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to investigate the connection between thermal history and physical aging in polymer glasses, in particular the effects of a temperature square step. Measurements of two-time correlation functions show…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
We numerically study the potential energy landscape of a fragile glassy system and find that the dynamic crossover corresponding to the glass transition is actually the effect of an underlying geometric transition caused by a qualitative…
Colloidal and other granular media experience a transition to rigidity known as jamming if the fill fraction is increased beyond a critical value. The resulting jammed structures are locally disordered, bear applied loads inhomogenously,…
We study experimentally the relaxation towards mechanical equilibrium of a granular pile which has just experienced an avalanche and discuss it in the more general context of the granular jamming transition. Two coexisting dynamics are…
We add relaxation mechanisms that mimic the effect of temperature and non-equilibrium driving to the recently-proposed spiral model which jams at a critical density rho_c < 1. This enables us to explore unjamming by temperature or driving…
Athermal disordered systems can exhibit a remarkable response to an applied oscillatory shear: after a relatively few shearing cycles, the system falls into a configuration that had already been visited in a previous cycle. After this point…
The dynamics of the jamming transition in a three-dimensional granular system under vertical vibration is studied using diffusing-wave spectroscopy. When the maximum acceleration of the external vibration is large, the granular system…
We numerically investigate the athermal creep deformation of amorphous materials having a wide range of stability. The imposed shear stress serves as the control parameter, allowing us to examine the time-dependent transient response…
We study various models of independent particles hopping between energy `traps' with a density of energy barriers $\rho(E)$, on a $d$ dimensional lattice or on a fully connected lattice. If $\rho(E)$ decays exponentially, a true dynamical…
Using molecular dynamics computer simulations we investigate how the glass transition and the properties of the resulting glass depend on the cooling rate with which the sample has been quenched. This is done by studying a two component…
The physics of disordered media, from metallic glasses to colloidal suspensions, granular matter and biological tissues, offers difficult challenges because it often occurs far from equilibrium, in materials lacking symmetries and evolving…
Brittle materials exhibit sharp dynamical fractures when meeting Griffith's criterion, whereas ductile materials blunt a sharp crack by plastic responses. Upon continuous pulling ductile materials exhibit a necking instability which is…
The recent experimental implementation of condensed matter models in optical lattices has motivated research on their nonequilibrium behavior. Predictions on the dynamics of superconductors following a sudden quench of the pairing…
Granular materials densify under repeated mechanical perturbations, a nonequilibrium dynamics that underlies many natural and industrial processes. Because granular relaxation is governed by frictional contacts and energy dissipation, this…
Dense particle packings acquire rigidity through a nonequilibrium jamming transition commonly observed in materials from emulsions to sandpiles. We describe athermal packings and their observed geometric phase transitions using fully…