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The complexity of condensed matter arises from emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual constituents in isolation. While traditional condensed-matter approaches-developed primarily for ideal crystalline…

A wide range of materials can exist in microscopically disordered solid forms, referred to as amorphous solids or glasses. Such materials -- oxide glasses and metallic glasses, to polymer glasses, and soft solids such as colloidal glasses,…

The nature of dark matter is one of the most pressing questions in particle physics. Yet all our present knowledge of the dark sector to date comes from its gravitational interactions with astrophysical systems. Moreover, astronomical…

Granulation is a process whereby a dense colloidal suspension is converted into pasty granules (surrounded by air) by application of shear. Central to the stability of the granules is the capillary force arising from the interfacial tension…

The Marginally Rigid State is a candidate paradigm for what makes granular material a state of matter distinct from both liquid and solid. Coordination number is identified as a discriminating characteristic, and for rough-surfaced…

Granular media near jamming exhibit fascinating properties, which can be harnessed to create jammed-granulate metamaterials: materials whose characteristics arise not only from the shape and material properties of the particles at the…

Cutting soft materials is a complex process governed by the interplay of bulk large deformation, interfacial soft fracture, and contact forces with the cutting tool. Existing experimental characterizations and numerical models often fail to…

Granular materials of different sizes are present on the surface of several atmosphere-less Solar System bodies. The phenomena related to granular materials have been studied in the framework of the discipline called Granular Physics; that…

Differentiable physics modeling combines physics models with gradient-based learning to provide model explicability and data efficiency. It has been used to learn dynamics, solve inverse problems and facilitate design, and is at its…

As dense granular materials are sheared, a shear band and an anisotropic force network form. The approach to steady state behavior depends on the history of the packing and the existing force and contact network. We present experiments on…

The fracture of highly deformable soft materials is of great practical importance in a wide range of technological applications, emerging in fields such as soft robotics, stretchable electronics and tissue engineering. From a basic physics…

Dark matter structures within strong gravitational lens galaxies and along their line of sight leave a gravitational imprint on the multiple images of lensed sources. Strong gravitational lensing provides, therefore, a key test of different…

Grain boundary roughness can affect electronic and mechanical properties of two-dimensional materials. This roughness depends crucially on the growth process by which the two-dimensional material is formed. To investigate the key mechanisms…

A number of dense particle suspensions experience a dramatic increase in viscosity with the shear stress, up to a solid-like response. This shear-thickening process is understood as a transition under flow of the nature of the contacts,…

Mechanical densification of granular bodies is a process in which a loose material becomes increasingly cohesive as the applied pressure increases. A constitutive description of this process faces the formidable problem that granular and…

In this paper, we recall various features of non equilibrium granular systems. Clusters with specific properties are found depending on the packing density, going from loose (a granular gas) to sintered (though brittle) polycrystalline…

The purpose of this study is to propose a modified micromorphic continuum model for granular materials based on a micromechanics approach. In this model, Cauchy stress and the couple stress are symmetric conjugated with the symmetric strain…

Many objects in nature and industry are wrapped in a thin sheet to enhance their chemical, mechanical, or optical properties. There are similarly a variety of methods for wrapping, from pressing a film onto a hard substrate, to using…

There is a long-standing discussion in the astrophysical/astrochemical community as to the structure and morphology of dust grains in various astrophysical environments (e.g., interstellar clouds, protostellar envelopes, protoplanetary and…

Dark matter is one of the pillars of the current standard model of structure formation: it is assumed to constitute most of the matter in the Universe. However, it can so far only be probed indirectly through its gravitational effects, and…