Related papers: Non-linear elasticity, yielding and entropy in amo…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
We provide the first characterization of the nonlinear and time dependent rheologic response of viscoelastic bottom-up holographic models. More precisely, we perform oscillatory shear tests in holographic massive gravity theories with…
When a hole is introduced into an elastic material, it will usually act to reduce the overall mechanical stiffness. A general ambition is to investigate whether a stiff shell around the hole can act to maintain the overall mechanical…
Nonlinear elastic theory studies the elastic constants of a material (such as Young's modulus or bulk modulus) as a power series in the applied load. The inverse bulk modulus K, for example depends on the compression P: $ {1/ K(P)} = c_0 +…
The dynamics of rapid brittle cracks is commonly studied in the framework of linear elastic fracture mechanics where nonlinearities are neglected. However, recent experimental and theoretical work demonstrated explicitly the importance of…
We study the elastic properties of soft solids containing air bubbles. Contrary to standard porous materials, the softness of the matrix allows for a coupling of the matrix elasticity to surface tension forces brought in by the bubbles.…
We study the nonlinear elastic response of a two-dimensional material to a localized boundary force, with the particular goal of understanding the differences observed between isotropic granular materials and those with hexagonal…
Torsional oscillator experiments show evidence of mass decoupling in solid 4He. This decoupling is amplitude dependent, suggesting a critical velocity for supersolidity. We observe similar behavior in the elastic shear modulus. By measuring…
The response of amorphous materials to an applied strain can be continuous, or instead display a macroscopic stress drop when a shear band nucleates. Such discontinuous response can be observed if the initial configuration is very stable.…
The shear strength of cohesionless granular materials is generally attributed to the compactness or anisotropy of their microstructure. An open issue is how such compact or anisotropic microstructures, and thus the shear strength, depend on…
We study how inhomogeneities modify large scale parameters in General Relativity. For a particular model, we obtain exact results: we compare an infinite string of extremal black holes to a corresponding smooth line with the same mass and…
Numerical simulations are used to test the kinetic theory constitutive relations of inertial granular shear flow. These predictions are shown to be accurate in the dilute regime, where only binary collisions are relevant, but underestimate…
Mechanical signaling plays a key role in biological processes like embryo development and cancer growth. One prominent way to probe mechanical properties of tissues is to study their response to externally applied forces. Using a…
Living materials such as membranes, cytoskeletal assemblies, cell collectives and tissues can often be described as active solids -- materials that are energized from within, with elastic response about a well defined reference…
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…
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…
Rheological properties of chiral active materials have been an important area of research in the recent past, in particular regarding odd terms in their mechanical response. While much progress has been made in the study of odd viscous…
We present an experimental investigation of the non stationary frictional properties of multicontact interfaces between rough elastomers and rough hard glass at low velocities (<= 200 mu m s^{-1}). These systems, for which the deformation…
The adhesive contact between elastic solids with randomly rough, self affine fractal surfaces is studied by molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The interfacial binding energy obtained from the simulations of nominally flat and curved…
In the Master's thesis of the author, we investigate certain aspects of gravitational physics that emerge from stochastic toy models of holographic gauge theories. We begin by reviewing field theory thermodynamics, black hole thermodynamics…