Related papers: Mechanical Behaviour of Glasses and Amorphous Mate…

Structural mechanisms in disordered materials like amorphous semi-conductors and glasses can be explored with the activation-relaxation technique (ART). The application of a sequence of such mechanisms allows for the generation of…

The behavior of shear-oscillated amorphous materials is studied using a coarse-grained model. Samples are prepared at different degrees of annealing and then subject to athermal and quasistatic oscillatory deformations at various fixed…

Solid materials are commonly classified as crystalline or amorphous based on the presence or absence of long-range order.Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), like other solids,also display markedly different properties and functions in these…

Active particles under soft confinement such as droplets or vesicles present intriguing phenomena, as collective motion emerges alongside the deformation of the environment. A model is employed to systematically investigate droplet…

The concept of mechanical screening is widely applied in solid-state systems. Examples include nucleation of defects in crystalline materials, scars and pleats in curved crystals, wrinkles in strongly confined thin sheets, and…

Granular materials such as sand, powders, foams etc. are ubiquitous in our daily life, as well as in industrial and geotechnical applications. Although these disordered systems form stable structures if unperturbed, in practice they do…

Using positional data from video-microscopy of a two-dimensional colloidal system and from simulations of hard discs we determine the wave-vector-dependent normal mode spring constants in the supercooled fluid and glassy state,…

Strongly correlated amorphous solids are a class of glass-formers whose inter-particle potential admits an approximate inverse power-law form in a relevant range of inter-particle distances. We study the steady-state plastic flow of such…

Mixing theoretical topological structures with cutting-edge simulation methods, a recent study in Nature Communications has finally confirmed the existence of topological defects in glasses and their crucial role for plasticity.

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…

We study aging in a colloidal suspension consisting of micron-sized particles in a liquid. This system is made glassy by increasing the particle concentration. We observe samples composed of particles of two sizes, with a size ratio of…

Glass is a microscopically disordered, solid form of matter that results when a fluid is cooled or compressed in such a fashion that it does not crystallise. Almost all types of materials are capable of glass formation -- polymers, metal…

Recent literature indicates that attractive interactions between particles of a dense liquid play a secondary role in determining its bulk mechanical properties. Here we show that, in contrast with their apparent unimportance to the bulk…

Concentrated colloidal suspensions are a well-tested model system which has a glass transition. Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high; the…

Due to the lack of long-range order, it remains challenging to characterize the structure of disordered solids and understand the nature of the glass transition. Here we propose a new structural order parameter by taking into account…

Recent years have seen a large increase in the number of reported framework materials, including the nowadays-ubiquitous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Many of these materials show flexibility and stimuli-responsiveness, i.e. their…

The universal anomalous vibrational and thermal properties of amorphous solids are believed to be related to the local variations of the elasticity. Recently it has been shown that the vibrational properties are sensitive to the glass's…

Amorphous materials of homogeneous structures usually suffer from nonuniform deformation under shear, which can develop into shear localization and eventually destructive shear band. One approach to tackle this issue is to introduce an…

We discuss the behavior of a crystalline surface with a disordered substrate. We focus on the possible existence of a {\em super-rough} glassy phase, with height-height correlation functions which vary as the square logarithm of the…

Understanding the structural origins of glass formation and mechanical response remains a central challenge in condensed matter physics. Recent studies have identified the local caging potential experienced by a particle due to its nearest…