Related papers: On the quest for the strongest materials

One might ask why is it important to know the mechanism of fracture in leaves when Mother Nature is doing her job perfectly. I could list the following reasons to address that question: (a) Leaves are natural composite structures, during…

This article addresses broad trends in interdisciplinary research in physics where interactions with colleagues in fields such as computer science, ecology, or economics can often be derailed by unintentional clashes of methodologies and…

I wish to expound a novel perspective of probing universal character of gravity. To begin with, inclusion of zero mass particle in mechanics leads to special relativity while its interaction with a universal force shared by all particles…

Experimental contributors to the field of Superconducting Materials share their informal views on the subject.

Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…

Experiments with electromagnetic probes are promising to search for baryon resonances that have been predicted by quark models but have not yet been observed. Data sets from different experiments show interesting resonance structures…

Anytime heuristic search algorithms try to find a (potentially suboptimal) solution as quickly as possible and then work to find better and better solutions until an optimal solution is obtained or time is exhausted. The most widely-known…

Determination of the fine structure constant alpha and search for its possible variation are considered. We focus on a role of the fine structure constant in modern physics and discuss precision tests of quantum electrodynamics. Different…

This is a (very) personal attempt to summarize the status of neutrino astronomy: its scientific motivations, our understanding of natural water and ice as particle detectors and, finally, the detector technology.

It is essential to know the arrangement of the atoms in a material in order to compute and understand its properties. Searching for stable structures of materials using first-principles electronic structure methods, such as density…

Part of the theoretical motivation for improving the present level of testing of the equivalence principle is reviewed. The general rationale for optimizing the choice of pairs of materials to be tested is presented. One introduces a…

This contribution has the aim to review the basics of existing knowledge on asteroid interiors and to explore the possibility of advancing the field by introducing into it some ideas from solid state physics.

If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…

For more than 150 years the structure of the periodic system of the chemical elements has intensively motivated research in different areas of chemistry and physics. However, there is still no unified picture of what a periodic system is.…

An array of powerful neutrino-beam experiments will study the fundamental properties of neutrinos with unprecedented precision in the coming years. Along with their primary neutrino-physics motivations, there has been growing recognition…

The deepest and clearest maps yet of the Universe's skeleton of dark matter structure present a picture broadly in concord with favoured models - although puzzling discrepancies remain.

This work focuses on the bearing rigidity theory, namely the branch of knowledge investigating the structural properties necessary for multi-element systems to preserve the inter-units bearings when exposed to deformations. The original…

Since the announcement in 2011 of the Materials Genome Initiative by the Obama administration, much attention has been given to the subject of materials design to accelerate the discovery of new materials that could have technological…

We study a material modeled as a network of nodes connected by edges. Using a discrete approach, we build a nonlinear algebraic system that connects applied forces to internal forces and node positions. The model can describe elasticity,…

Over the past decade, evolutionary algorithms, data mining, and other methods showed great success in solving the main problem of theoretical crystallography: finding the stable structure for a given chemical composition. Here we develop a…