Related papers: The pinning effect of dilute defects
The membrane model is a Gaussian interface model with a Hamiltonian involving second derivatives of the interface height. We consider the model in dimension $\mathsf{d}\ge4$ under the influence of $\delta$-pinning of strength $\varepsilon$.…
We study the effect of dilute pinning on the jamming transition. Pinning reduces the average contact number needed to jam unpinned particles and shifts the jamming threshold to lower densities, leading to a pinning susceptibility, $\chi_p$.…
The shape of a liquid-air interface advancing on a heterogeneous surface was studied experimentally, together with the force induced by the pinning of the contact line to surface defects. Different surfaces were considered with circular…
This paper considers the Alt-Caffarelli free boundary problem in a periodic medium. This is a convenient model for several interesting phenomena appearing in the study of contact lines on rough surfaces, pinning, hysteresis and the…
Local contact line pinning prevents droplets from rearranging to minimal global energy, and models for droplets without pinning cannot predict their shape. We show that experiments are much better described by a theory, developed herein,…
We homogenize the Laplace and heat equations with the Neumann data oscillating in the ``vertical" $u$-variable. These are simplified models for interface motion in heterogeneous media, particularly capillary contact lines. The…
We study the influence of a point defect on the profile of a growing surface in the single-step growth model. We employ the mapping to the asymmetric exclusion model with blockage, and using Bethe-Ansatz eigenfunctions as a starting…
Disordered pinning models are statistical mechanics models built on discrete renewal processes: renewal epochs in this context are called contacts. It is well known that pinning models can undergo a localization/delocalization phase…
We study the case of contact angle hysteresis, when a solid defect is quasi-statically pulled out and pushed into a liquid, in the presence of gravity. We solve the problem analytically in an approximation which, in the case of a truncated…
We consider a model for the evolution of an interface in a heterogeneous environment governed by a parabolic equation. The heterogeneity is introduced as obstacles exerting a localized dry friction. Our main result establishes the emergence…
We consider a toy model of rate independent droplet motion on a surface with contact angle hysteresis based on the one-phase Bernoulli free boundary problem. We introduce a notion of solutions based on an obstacle problem. These solutions…
We study theoretically the effects of strong pinning centers on a charge density wave in the limit that the charge density wave coherence length is shorter than the average inter-impurity distance. An analysis based on a Ginzburg-Landau…
The contact angle of a fluid droplet on an heterogeneous surface is analysed using the statistical dynamics of the spreading contact line. The statistical properties of the final droplet radius and contact angle are obtained through…
We consider the van der Waals' free energy functional, with a scaling small parameter epsilon, in the plane domain given by the first quadrant, and inhomogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. The boundary data are chosen in such a way that…
We simulate a model of repulsively interacting colloids on a commensurate two-dimensional triangular pinning substrate where the amount of heterogeneous motion that appears at melting can be controlled systematically by turning off a…
We design and analyse a Nitsche method for contact problems. Compared to the seminal work of Chouly and Hild (A Nitsche-based method for unilateral contact problems: numerical analysis. SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 51 (2013), no. 2) our method is…
In materials science, wedge disclinations are defects caused by angular mismatches in the crystallographic lattice. To describe such disclinations, we introduce an atomistic model in planar domains. This model is given by a…
If a variational problem comes with no boundary conditions prescribed beforehand, and yet these arise as a consequence of the variation process itself, we speak of a free boundary values variational problem. Such is, for instance, the…
In this paper, we are concerned with obtaining distribution-free concentration inequalities for mixture of independent Bernoulli variables that incorporate a notion of variance. Missing mass is the total probability mass associated to the…
The compression of soft elastic matter and biological tissue can lead to creasing, an instability where a surface folds sharply into periodic self-contacts. Intriguingly, the unfolding of the surface upon releasing the strain is usually not…