Related papers: Avalanches and deformation in glasses and disorder…
Mean-field models of glasses that present a random first order transition exhibit highly non-trivial fluctuations. Building on previous studies that focused on the critical scaling regime, we here obtain a fully quantitative framework for…
The thermally activated creep motion of an elastic interface weakly driven on a disordered landscape is one of the best examples of glassy universal dynamics. Its understanding has evolved over the last 30 years thanks to a fruitful…
The discrete Gaussian model for the surface of a crystal deposited on a disordered substrate is studied by Monte Carlo simulations. A continuous transition is found from a phase with a thermally-induced roughness to a glassy one in which…
We compare the heat release data of organic glasses with that of amorphous and glass like crystalline solids. Anomalous behavior was found in all these materials, which disagrees with the standard tunneling model. We can explain the most of…
Apart from not having crystallized, supercooled liquids can be considered as being properly equilibrated and thus can be described by a few thermodynamic control variables. In contrast, glasses and other amorphous solids can be arbitrarily…
Using molecular dynamics simulation, we examine the dynamics of crystal, polycrystal, and glass in a Lennard-Jones binary mixture composed of small and large particles in two dimensions. The crossovers occur among these states as the…
Elastic models of the glass transition relate the relaxation dynamics and the elastic properties of structural glasses. They are based on the assumption that the relaxation dynamics occurs through activated events in the energy landscape…
In equilibrium, disorder conspires with topological defects to redefine the ordered states of matter in systems as diverse as crystals, superconductors and liquid crystals. Far from equilibrium, however, the consequences of quenched…
We study experimentally the relaxation towards mechanical equilibrium of a granular pile which has just experienced an avalanche and discuss it in the more general context of the granular jamming transition. Two coexisting dynamics are…
The jamming scenario of disordered media, formulated about 10 years ago, has in recent years been advanced by analyzing model systems of granular media. This has led to various new concepts that are increasingly being explored in in a…
Glasses are amorphous solids whose constituent particles are caged by their neighbors and thus cannot flow. This sluggishness is often ascribed to the free energy landscape containing multiple minima (basins) separated by high barriers.…
The topological nature of the disorder of glasses and supercooled liquids strongly affects their high-frequency dynamics. In order to understand its main features, we analytically studied a simple topologically disordered model, where the…
Under applied shear strain, granular and amorphous materials deform via particle rearrangements, which can be small and localized or organized into system-spanning avalanches. While the statistical properties of avalanches under…
Alloying metals with other elements is often done to improve the material strength or hardness. A key microscopic mechanism is precipitation hardening, where precipitates impede dislocation motion, but the role of such obstacles in…
These lecture notes can be read in two ways. The first two Sections contain a review of the phenomenology of several physical systems with slow nonequilibrium dynamics. In the Conclusions we summarize the scenario derived from the solution…
We consider the dynamics of a droplet on a vibrating fluid bath. This hydrodynamic quantum analog system is shown to elicit the canonical behavior of damped-driven systems, including a period doubling route to chaos. By approximating the…
Numerous systems ranging from deformation of materials to earthquakes exhibit bursty dynamics, which consist of a sequence of events with a broad event size distribution. Very often these events are observed to be temporally correlated or…
We present a finite-size study of the athermal quasistatic yielding transition in structural glasses featuring a wide range of mechanical disorder. We find a crossover from gradual yielding in small systems, to a macroscopic discontinuous…
A theoretical analysis [Angelani et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 065702 (2006)] predicts glassy behaviour of light in a nonlinear random medium. This implies slow dynamics related to the presence of many metastable states. We consider very…
Despite the extreme simplicity in their definition, spin glasses disclose a wide variety of non-trivial behaviors that are not yet fully understood. In this thesis we try to shed light on some of them, focusing on one hand on the search of…