Related papers: Gardner-like transition from variable to persisten…
When driven by nonequilibrium fluctuations, particle systems may display phase transitions and physical behaviour with no equilibrium counterpart. We study a two-dimensional particle model initially proposed to describe driven non-Brownian…
Dense suspensions can exhibit an abrupt change in their viscosity in response to increasing shear rate. The origin of this discontinuous shear thickening (DST) has been ascribed to the transformation of lubricated contacts to frictional,…
We use computer simulations to study the microscopic dynamics of an athermal assembly of soft particles near the fluid-to-solid, jamming transition. Borrowing tools developed to study dynamic heterogeneity near glass transitions, we…
In a previous work a model was proposed for the phase transitions of crystals with localized magnetic moments which at low temperature have a "conical" arrangement that at higher T transforms into a more symmetrical structure (depending on…
The jamming transition of soft particles characterized by narrow size distributions has been well studied by physicists. However, polydispersed systems are more relevant to engineering, and the influence of polydispersity on jamming…
Many systems in nature exhibit transitions between fluid-like states and solid-like states, or "jamming transitions". There is a strong theoretical foundation for understanding equilibrium phase transitions that involve solidification, or…
Intermolecular forces are known to precipitate adhesion events between solid bodies. Inspired by a macro-scale experiment showing the hysteretic adhesion of a piece of flexible tape over a plastic substrate, we develop here a model of…
We study the effects of weak disorder on a Wigner crystal in a magnetic field. We show that an elastic description of the pinned Wigner crystal provides an excellent framework to obtain most of the physically relevant observables. Using…
We present an experimental study of density and order fluctuations in the vicinity of the solid-liquid-like transition that occurs in a vibrated quasi-two-dimensional granular system. The two-dimensional projected static and dynamic…
Motivated by experiments on sheared suspensions that show a transition between ordered and disordered phases, we here study the long-time behavior of a sheared and overdamped 2-d system of particles interacting by repulsive forces. As a…
Wigner crystals are extremely fragile, which is shown to result from very strong geometric frustration germane to long-range Coulomb interactions. Physically, this is manifested by a very small characteristic energy scale for shear density…
We study structural transitions in a system of interacting particles arranged as a crystalline bilayer, as a function of the density $\rho$ and the distance $d$ between the layers. As $d$ is decreased a sequence of transitions involving…
The effect of increasing structural disorder on the distribution of contact forces P(f), inside three dimensional particle assemblies is systematically studied using computer simulations of model granular packings. Starting from a…
Expressions are obtained for force and couple densities and stress tensors in macroscopic models for nematic liquid crystals subjected to electric fields. The coupling between the liquid crystal orientational properties and the electric…
A two-dimensional system of particles with tunable repulsive interactions is experimentally investigated. Soft ferromagnetic particles are placed on a vibrating rough plate and vertically confined, so that they perform a horizontal Brownian…
We present a minimalistic approach to simulations of force transmission through granular systems. We start from a configuration containing cohesive (tensile) contact forces and use an adaptive procedure to find the stable configuration with…
We study Harmonic Soft Spheres as a model of thermal structural glasses in the limit of infinite dimensions. We show that cooling, compressing and shearing a glass lead to a Gardner transition and, hence, to a marginally stable amorphous…
Recent works on hard spheres in the limit of infinite dimensions revealed that glass states, envisioned as meta-basins in configuration space, can break up in a multitude of separate basins at low enough temperature or high enough pressure,…
The interplay between different types of disorder and electron-electron interactions in graphene planes is studied by means of Renormalization Group techniques. The low temperature properties of the system are determined by fixed points…
Elastic properties of soft, three-dimensional dimers, interacting through site-site n-inverse-power potential, are determined by computer simulations at zero temperature. The degenerate crystal of dimers exhibiting (Gaussian) size…