Related papers: A device for studying elementary plasticity fluctu…
Elastic wave propagation provides a noninvasive way to probe granular materials. The discrete element method using particle configuration as input, allows a micromechanical interpretation on the acoustic response of a given granular system.…
Experimental and theoretical studies are made of Brownian particles trapped in a periodic potential, which is very slightly tilted due to gravity. In the presence of fluctuations, these will trigger a measurable average drift along the…
Two dimensional simulations of non-cohesive granular matter in a biaxial shear tester are discussed. The effect of particle elasticity on the mechanical behavior is investigated using two complementary distinct element methods (DEM): Soft…
We present an experimental approach to discriminate hyper-elastic models describing the mechanical behavior of rubber-like materials. An evaluation of the displacement field obtained by digital image correlation allows us to evaluate the…
Plastic deformation of micron-scale crystalline materials differ considerably from bulk ones, because it is characterized by random strain bursts. To obtain a detailed picture about this stochastic phenomenon, micron sized pillars have been…
We describe a high-resolution, high-bandwidth technique for determining the local viscoelasticity of soft materials such as polymer gels. Loss and storage shear moduli are determined from the power spectra of thermal fluctuations of…
We study a simple micro-mechanical device that does not lose its snap-through behavior in an environment dominated by fluctuations. The main idea is to have several degrees of freedom that can cooperatively resist the de-synchronizing…
Complex fluids subjected to localized microscopic energy inputs, typical of active microrheology setups, exhibit poorly understood nonequilibrium behaviors because of the intricate self-organization of their mesoscopic constituents. In this…
This article is a tutorial on the practical implementation of a method of measurement of minute deformations based on multiple scattering. This technic has been recently developed and has proven to give new insights on the spatial…
We investigate the conditions leading to large drag force fluctuations in granular materials. The study is based on a set of experimental drag tests, which involve pulling a plate vertically through a cohesionless granular material. In…
We consider a system of granular particles, modeled by two dimensional frictional elastic disks, that is exposed to externally applied time-dependent shear stress in a planar Couette geometry. We concentrate on the external forcing that…
We study long range density fluctuations (hyperuniformity) in two-dimensional jammed packings of bidisperse droplets. Taking advantage of microfluidics, we systematically span a large range of size and concentration ratios of the two…
Compression experiments are widely used to study the mechanical properties of materials at micro- and nanoscale. However, the conventional engineering stress measurement method used in these experiments neglects to account for the…
We study the local disorder in the deformation of amorphous materials by decomposing the particle displacements into a continuous, inhomogeneous field and the corresponding fluctuations. We compare these fields to the commonly used…
Granular systems are not always homogeneous and can be composed of grains with very different mechanical properties. To improve our understanding of the behavior of real granular systems, in this experimental study, we compress 2D…
We present a simple method for accessing the elastic properties of microscopic deformable particles. This method is based on measuring the pressure-induced deformation of soft particles as they are forced through a tapered glass…
A new method is proposed for the analysis of specular and off-specular reflectivity from supported lipid bilayers. Both thermal fluctuations and the "static" roughness induced by the substrate are carefully taken into account. Examples from…
Coarse-graining atomic displacements in a solid produces both local affine strains and "non-affine" fluctuations. Here we study the equilibrium dynamics of these coarse grained quantities to obtain space-time dependent correlation…
We propose a methodology to measure the mechanical properties of membranes from their fluctuations and apply this to optical microscopy measurements of giant unilamellar vesicles of lipids. We analyze the effect of the projection of thermal…
The elastic moduli of four numerical random isotropic packings of Hertzian spheres are studied. The four samples are assembled with different preparation procedures, two of which aim to reproduce experimental compaction by vibration and…