Related papers: Mechanical Behaviour of Glasses and Amorphous Mate…
Despite their technological relevance, a full microscopic understanding of glasses is still lacking. This applies even more to their surfaces whose properties largely differ from that of the bulk material. Here, we experimentally…
Motivated by results of the topological theory of glasses accounting for geometric frustration, we develop the simplest possible continuum mechanical model of defect dynamics in metallic glasses that accounts for topological, energetic, and…
Glasses are ubiquitous in daily life and technology. However the microscopic mechanisms generating this state of matter remain subject to debate: Glasses are considered either as merely hyper-viscous liquids or as resulting from a genuine…
Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…
Recent computer simulations reveal several intriguing features in the evolution of properties of amorphous solids subjected to repeated cyclic shear deformation. These include the divergence of the number of cycles to reach steady states as…
Glassy polymer melts such as the plastics used in pipes, structural materials, and medical devices are ubiquitous in daily life. They accumulate damage over time due to their use, which limits their functionalities and demands periodic…
Investigating the behavior of amorphous solids under various external loading conditions continues to be an intriguing area of research with significant practical implications. In this study, we demonstrate the utilization of self-motility…
Hybrid glasses connect emerging fields of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with the glass-formation, amorphization, and melting processes of these structurally diverse and chemically versatile systems. Most zeolites, including MOFs,…
Upon mechanical loading, granular materials yield and undergo plastic deformation. The nature of plastic deformation is essential for the development of the macroscopic constitutive models and the understanding of shear band formation.…
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…
Glassy solids may undergo a fluidization (yielding) transition upon deformation whereby the material starts to flow plastically. It has been a matter of debate whether this process is controlled by a specific time scale, from among…
In many interesting physical settings, such as the vulcanization of rubber, the introduction of permanent random constraints between the constituents of a homogeneous fluid can cause a phase transition to a random solid state. In this…
Understanding and controlling physical aging, i.e. the spontaneous temporal evolution of out-of-equilibrium systems, represents one of the greatest tasks in material science. Recent studies have revealed the existence of a complex atomic…
Amorphous solids exhibit intrinsic, local structural transitions, that give rise to the well known quantum-mechanical two-level systems at low temperatures. We explain the microscopic origin of the electric dipole moment of these two-level…
Many structural glasses feature static and dynamic mechanical properties that can depend strongly on glass formation history. The degree of universality of this history-dependence, and what it is possibly affected by, are largely…
Space-filling assemblies of athermal hydrophobic particles floating at an air-water interface, called particle rafts, are shown to undergo an unusual phase transition between two i.e., a low density `less-rigid and a high density…
When stressed sufficiently, solid materials yield and deform plastically via reorganization of microscopic constituents. Indeed, it is possible to alter the micro-structure of materials by judicious application of stress, an empirical pro-…
Since the 1970's, theories of deformation and failure of amorphous, solidlike materials have started with models in which stress-driven, molecular rearrangements occur at localized flow defects via "shear transformations". This picture is…
It is known by now that amorphous solids at zero temperature do not possess a nonlinear elasticity theory: besides the shear modulus which exists, all the higher order coefficients do not exist in the thermodynamic limit. Here we show that…
Over times shorter than that required for relaxation of enthalpy, a liquid can exhibit striking heterogeneities. The picture of these heterogeneities is complex with transient patches of rigidity, irregular yet persistent, intersected by…