Related papers: Unexpected ductility in semiflexible polymer glass…
The number of compact structures of a single condensed polymer (SCP), with similar free energies, grows exponentially with the degree of polymerization. In analogy with structural glasses (SGs), we expect that at low temperatures chain…
In order to design tougher materials, it is crucial to understand the relationship between their composition and their resistance to fracture. To this end, we investigate the fracture toughness of usual sodium silicate glasses (NS) and…
The rapid collapse of a polymer, due to external forces or changes in solvent, yields a long-lived `crumpled globule.' The conjectured fractal structure shaped by hierarchical collapse dynamics has proved difficult to establish, even with…
The crazing behavior of polymer nanocomposites formed by blending polymer grafted nanoparticles with an entangled polymer melt is studied by molecular dynamics simulations. We focus on the three key differences in the crazing behavior of a…
Fracture initiation in glassy polymers with no notch is studied together with the evolution at zero stress in the glassy state. Confocal microscopy observations and auto-correlation methods are used to characterize specimens of polymethyl…
Glassy polymers show strain hardening: at constant extensional load, their flow first accelerates, then arrests. Recent experiments under such loading have found this to be accompanied by a striking dip in the segmental relaxation time.…
We prove that the empirical density of states of quantum spin glasses on arbitrary graphs converges to a normal distribution as long as the maximal degree is negligible compared with the total number of edges. This extends the recent…
The dynamic structure factor of semiflexible polymers in solution is derived from the wormlike chain model. Special attention is paid to the rigid constraint of an inextensible contour and to the hydrodynamic interactions. For the cases of…
We describe simulations of the quantum dynamics of a confocal cavity QED system that realizes an intrinsically driven-dissipative spin glass. A close connection between open quantum dynamics and replica symmetry breaking is established, in…
We present an exact and Monte Carlo renormalization group (MCRG) study of semiflexible polymer chains on an infinite family of the plane-filling (PF) fractals. The fractals are compact, that is, their fractal dimension $d_f$ is equal to 2…
Simulations are used to examine the microscopic origins of strain hardening in polymer glasses. While traditional entropic network models can be fit to the total stress, their underlying assumptions are inconsistent with simulation results.…
We study snapping and shaky polyhedra which consist of antiprismatic skeletons covered by polyhedral belts composed of triangular faces only. In detail, we generalize Wunderlich's trisymmetric sandglass polyhedron in analogy to the…
We introduce a lattice model of glass transition in polymer globules. This model exhibits a novel scenario of ergodicity breaking in which the disjoint regions of phase space do not arise uniformly, but as small chambers whose number…
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,…
Unlike crystals, glasses age or devitrify over time, reflecting their non-equilibrium nature. This lack of stability is a serious issue in many industrial applications. Here, we show by numerical simulations that the devitrification of…
Dilute magnetic nanoparticle systems exhibit slow dynamics [1] due to a broad distribution of relaxation times that can be traced to a correspondingly broad distribution of particle sizes [1]. However, at higher concentrations interparticle…
We investigate the properties of the glass phase of a recently introduced spin glass model of soft spins subjected to an anharmonic quartic local potential, which serves as a model of low temperature molecular or soft glasses. We solve the…
Recent step strain experiments in well-entangled polymeric liquids demonstrated a bulk fracture-like phenomenon. We have studied this instability using a modern version of the Doi-Edwards theory for entangled polymers, and we find close…
Plastically deforming crystals exhibit scale-free fluctuations that are similar to those observed in driven disordered elastic systems close to depinning, but the nature of the yielding critical point is still debated. Here, we study the…
We report observations of unusal \emph{first} plastic events in silica and metallic glasses in the shear startup regime at applied strain two orders of magnitude smaller than yield strain. The (non-Affine) particle displacement field during…