Related papers: A smart granular intruder
Matrix inversion problems are often encountered in experimental physics, and in particular in high-energy particle physics, under the name of unfolding. The true spectrum of a physical quantity is deformed by the presence of a detector,…
We explain why the concept of a spontaneously broken superconformal symmetry is useful to describe inflationary models favored by the Planck. Non-minimal coupling of complex scalars to curvature, N(X, X*) R, is compulsory for superconformal…
A symmetrically-buckled arch whose boundaries are clamped at an angle has two stable equilibria: an inverted and a natural state. When the distance between the clamps is increased (i.e. the confinement is decreased) the system snaps from…
Liquid crystal elastomers contract along their director on heating and recover on cooling, offering great potential as actuators and artificial muscles. If a flat sheet is programmed with a spatially varying director pattern, it will…
Active colloidal particles typically exhibit a pronounced affinity for accumulating and being captured at boundaries. Here, we engineer long-range repulsive interactions between colloids that self-propel under an electric field and…
Topological insulators are crystalline materials that have revolutionized our ability to control wave transport. They provide us with unidirectional channels that are immune to obstacles, defects or local disorder, and can even survive some…
Inspired by the modelization of 2D materials systems, we characterize arrangements of identical nonflat squares in 3D. We prove that the fine geometry of such arrangements is completely characterized in terms of patterns of mutual…
We study the passage of active and passive granular particles through a bottleneck under gravitational bias. The grains are pharmaceutical capsules with nearly spherocylindrical shapes on a vibrating table. The vibrating plate is slightly…
The acoustic inverse obstacle scattering problem consists of determining the shape of a domain from measurements of the scattered far field due to some set of incident fields (probes). For a penetrable object with known sound speed, this…
Topological materials have potential applications for quantum technologies. Non-interacting topological materials, such as e.g., topological insulators and superconductors, are classified by means of fundamental symmetry classes. It is…
Constraining motion to a flat surface is a fundamental requirement for equipment across science and engineering. Modern precision robotic motion systems, such as gantries, rely on the flatness of components, including guide rails and…
The flow of granular material in a rotating cylinder was simulated by molecular dynamics in two dimensions using spherical as well as nonspherical grains. At very low but constant angular velocity we found that the flow varies irregularly…
Glitches are sudden spin-up events that interrupt the gradual spin-down of rotating neutron stars. They are believed to arise from the rapid unpinning of vortices in the neutron star inner crust. The analogy between the inner crust of…
Emergent phenomena share the fascinating property of not being obvious consequences of the design of the system in which they appear. This characteristic is no less relevant when attempting to simulate such phenomena, given that the outcome…
We analyze response of a macromolecule near to a substrate; the substrate is tiled in the sequential and specific manner so that repeat units of the macromolecule may have different response on its adsorption in different directions onto…
Object search -- the problem of finding a target object in a cluttered scene -- is essential to solve for many robotics applications in warehouse and household environments. However, cluttered environments entail that objects often occlude…
Exploiting the energy of randomly moving active agents such as bacteria is a fascinating way to power a microdevice. Here we show, by simulations, that a chain-grafted disk-like colloid can rotate unidirectionally when immersed in a thin…
We study the compaction and mobility properties of a dense granular material under weak random vibration. By putting in direct contact millimetric glass beads with piezoelectric transducers we manage to inject energy to the system in a…
We study experimentally and computationally the dynamics of granular flow during impacts, where intruders strike a collection of disks from above. In the regime where granular force dynamics are much more rapid than the intruder motion, we…
Inverse medium scattering is an ill-posed, nonlinear wave-based imaging problem arising in medical imaging, remote sensing, and non-destructive testing. Machine learning (ML) methods offer increased inference speed and flexibility in…