Related papers: Unexpected ductility in semiflexible polymer glass…
Cracks, the major vehicle for material failure, tend to accelerate to high velocities in brittle materials. In three-dimensions, cracks generically undergo a micro-branching instability at about 40% of their sonic limiting velocity. Recent…
We discuss the microscopic mechanisms by which low-temperature amorphous states, such as ultrastable glasses, transform into equilibrium fluids, after a sudden temperature increase. Experiments suggest that this process is similar to the…
A new class of lattice gas models with trivial interactions but constrained dynamics are introduced. These are proven to exhibit a dynamical glass transition: above a critical density, rho_c, ergodicity is broken due to the appearance of an…
Although the concept of random close packing with an almost universal packing fraction of ~ 0.64 for hard spheres was introduced more than half a century ago, there are still ongoing debates. The main difficulty in searching the densest…
When the center of fluctuations, i.e., the nonequilibrium eigenphase, undergoes transformation, there emerge critical parameters that demonstrate insensitivity to fluctuation perturbations and even independence from the molecular physical…
We review 15 years of theoretical and experimental work on the non-linear response of glassy systems. We argue that an anomalous growth of the peak value of non-linear susceptibilities is a signature of growing "amorphous order" in the…
We performed molecular dynamics simulations to study equilibrium and flow properties of a liquid in a nano-channel with confining surfaces coated with a layer of grafted semiflexible polymers. The coverage spans a wide range of grafting…
Fully bioresorbable polymer matrix composites have long been considered as potential orthopaedic implant materials, however their combination of mechanical strength, stiffness, ductility and bioresorbability is also attractive for cardiac…
The origin of stretched exponential relaxation in supercooled glass-forming liquids is one of the central questions regarding the anomalous dynamics of these fluids. The dominant explanation for this phenomenon has long been the proposition…
We study theoretically and numerically the elastic properties of hard sphere glasses, and provide a real-space description of their mechanical stability. In contrast to repulsive particles at zero-temperature, we argue that the presence of…
The theory of glassy fluctuations can be formulated in terms of disordered effective potentials. While the properties of the average potentials are well understood, the study of the fluctuations has been so far quite limited. Close to the…
We image local structural rearrangements in soft colloidal glasses under small periodic perturbations induced by thermal cycling. Local structural entropy $S_{2}$ positively correlates with observed rearrangements in colloidal glasses. The…
We study the fragmentation of collisional ring galaxies (CRGs) using a linear perturbation analysis that computes the physical conditions of gravitational instability, as determined by the balance of self-gravity of the ring against…
Since the discovery of spin glasses in dilute magnetic systems, their study has been largely focused on understanding randomness and defects as the driving mechanism. The same paradigm has also been applied to explain glassy states found in…
Soft, quasilocalized excitations (QLEs) are known to generically emerge in a broad class of disordered solids, and to govern many facets of the physics of glasses, from wave attenuation to plastic instabilities. In view of this key role of…
Pattern formation induced by wrinkling is a very common phenomenon exhibited in soft-matter substrates. In all these systems wrinkles develop in presence of compressively stressed thin films lying on compliant substrates. Here we…
Brownian motion and viscoelasticity of semiflexible polymers is a subject that has been studied for many years. Still, rigorous analysis has been hindered due to the difficulty in handling the constraint that polymer chains cannot be…
Complex fluids such as water exhibits many anomalous phenomena, and research suggests these properties are closely tied to critical fluctuations near the liquid-liquid phase transition critical point (LLCP). However, whether a similar LLCP…
We investigate, using numerical simulations and analytical arguments, a simple one dimensional model for the swelling or the collapse of a closed polymer chain of size N, representing the dynamical evolution of a polymer in a \Theta-solvent…
Spin glasses occupy a unique place in condensed matter: they freeze collectively while remaining struc-turally disordered, and they exhibit slow, history-dependent dynamics that reflect an exceptionally rug-ged free-energy landscape. This…