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One of the great mysteries of contemporary science is dark matter, an exotic substance of unknown nature that, in theory, makes up about 27\% of the total mass-energy density of the universe, and which does not appear to emit, absorb, or…
In this review we summarize theoretical progress in the field of active matter, placing it in the context of recent experiments. Our approach offers a unified framework for the mechanical and statistical properties of living matter:…
The paper develops the stiffness relationship between the movements and forces among a system of discrete interacting grains. The approach is similar to that used in structural analysis, but the stiffness matrix of granular material is…
Granular jamming is a popular soft actuation mechanism that provides high stiffness variability with minimum volume variation. Jamming is particularly interesting from a design perspective, as a myriad of design parameters can potentially…
Grasping deformable objects is not well researched due to the complexity in modelling and simulating the dynamic behavior of such objects. However, with the rapid development of physics-based simulators that support soft bodies, the…
Dark matter in the universe seems to be one of the most important puzzles science has to face in this moment. In this essay we point out that dark matter could be a spin-0 fundamental interaction of Nature rather than a simple particle.…
I discuss non-trivial effects in the soft SUSY breaking terms which appear when one integrates out heavy fields. The effects exist only when the SUSY breaking terms are non-universal. They may spoil (1) the hierarchy between the weak and…
Disordered solids, straddling the solid-fluid boundary, lack a comprehensive continuum mechanical description. They exhibit a complex microstructure wherein multiple meta-stable states exist. Deforming disordered solids induces particles…
The fast-growing field of soft matter research requires increasingly sophisticated tools for experimental studies. One of the oldest and most widely used tools to study soft matter systems is optical microscopy. Recent advances in optical…
Obtaining general relations between macroscopic properties of random assemblies, such as density, and the microscopic properties of their constituent particles, such as shape, is a foundational challenge in the study of amorphous materials.…
A continuum dislocation model of formation of grains whose boundaries have a non-vanishing thickness is proposed. For a single crystal deforming in simple shear the lamellar structure of grains with thin layers containing dislocations as…
The nature of the dark matter remains a mystery. The possibility of an unstable dark matter particle decaying to invisible daughter particles has been explored many times in the past few decades. Meanwhile, weak gravitational lensing shear…
Quasi-rigidity means that one builds a theory for assemblies of grains under a slowly changing external load by using the deformation of those grains as a small parameter. Is quasi-rigidity a complete theory for these granular assemblies?…
There is a vast menagerie of plausible candidates for the constituents of dark matter, both within and beyond extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. Each of these candidates may have scattering (and other) cross section…
Many materials of contemporary interest, such as gels, biological tissues and elastomers, are easily deformed but essentially incompressible. Traditional linear theory of elasticity implements incompressibility only to first order and thus…
We create a mechanical digger able to move within 2D densely-packed granular media, in a manner intrinsically different from the existing biomimic diggers. The characteristics of our design include that the average grain size is about one…
We review recent developments in size separation in vibrated granular materials. Motivated by a need in industry to efficiently handle granular materials and a desire to make fundamental advances in non-equilibrium physics, experimental and…
We introduce a Magnetic Resonance Imaging technique to study the geometry of shear zones of soft, low-frictional and hard, frictional granular materials and their mixtures. Hydrogel spheres serve as the soft, low-frictional material…
Treating dark matter at large scales as an effectively viscous fluid provides an improved framework for the calculation of the density and velocity power spectra compared to the standard assumption of an ideal pressureless fluid. We discuss…
This paper, in French, describes a series of completely different behaviours of the mechanics of granular matter, which are obtained experimentally using periodic forcing at different amplitude, frequency and orientation. It starts with the…