Related papers: The pinning effect of dilute defects
As a model of two thermally excited flux liquids connected by a weak link, we study the effect of a single line defect on vortex filaments oriented parallel to the surface of a thin planar superconductor. When the applied field is tilted…
We examine the bound state(s) associated with a single cubic nonlinear impurity, in a one-dimensional tight-binding lattice, where hopping to first--and--second nearest neighbors is allowed. The model is solved in closed form {\em v\`{\i}a}…
The shape of a drop pinned in a local equilibrium on an incline is a long-standing problem. The substrate can be homogeneous or heterogeneous and we herewith consider a drop pinned on an incline at the junction between a hydrophilic…
We develop a cut finite element method for the Bernoulli free boundary problem. The free boundary, represented by an approximate signed distance function on a fixed background mesh, is allowed to intersect elements in an arbitrary fashion.…
The effects of contact-line pinning are well-known in macroscopic systems, but are only just beginning to be explored at the microscale in colloidal suspensions. We use digital holography to capture the fast three-dimensional dynamics of…
We use a macroscopic Hamiltonian approach to study the pinning of a solid--liquid--vapour contact line on an array of equidistant stripes of obstacles perpendicular to the liquid. We propose an estimate of the density of pinning stripes for…
We prove some concavity properties connected to nonlinear Bernoulli type free boundary problems. In particular, we prove a Brunn-Minkowski inequality and an Urysohn's type inequality for the Bernoulli Constant and we study the behaviour of…
In this paper, we consider a free boundary problem of a semilinear nonhomogeneous elliptic equation with Bernoulli's type free boundary. The existence and regularity of the solution to the free boundary problem are established by use of the…
We consider the shape-topological control of a singularly perturbed variational inequality. The geometry-dependent state problem that we address in this paper concerns a heterogeneous medium with a micro-object (defect) and a macro-object…
Proteins dissolved in a drop induce and enhance the pinning of the drop contact line. This effect dramatically increases volume of drops that are vertically pinned on a flat siliconized substrate. The drop pinning behavior exhibits two…
The motion of an air-fluid interface through an irregularly coated capillary is studied by analysing the Lucas-Washburn equation with a random capillary force. The pinning probability goes from zero to a maximum value, as the interface…
We study numerically and analytically the coarsening of stripe phases in two spatial dimensions, and show that transient configurations do not achieve long ranged orientational order but rather evolve into glassy configurations with very…
Understanding the role played by the microstructure of materials on their macroscopic failure properties is an important challenge in solid mechanics. Indeed, when a crack propagates at a heterogeneous brittle interface, the front is…
We consider a symmetric Anderson impurity model, with a soft-gap hybridization vanishing at the Fermi level with a power law r > 0. Three facets of the problem are examined. First the non-interacting limit, which despite its simplicity…
The boundary problem is considered for inhomogeneous increasing random walks on the square lattice ${\mathbb Z}_+^2$ with weighted edges. Explicit solutions are given for some instances related to the classical and generalized number…
Amorphous solids are known to fail catastrophically via fracture, wherein cavitation at nano-metric scales is known to play a significant role. Micro-alloying via inclusions is often used as a means to increase the fracture toughness of…
In this paper we study the local behavior of solutions to some free boundary problems. We relate the theory of quasi-conformal maps to the regularity of the solutions to nonlinear thin-obstacle problems; we prove that the contact set is…
The propagation of an adhesive crack through an anisotropic heterogeneous interface is considered. Tuning the local toughness distribution function and spatial correlation is numerically shown to induce a transition between weak to strong…
We consider models of directed random polymers interacting with a defect line, which are known to undergo a pinning/depinning (or localization/delocalization) phase transition. We are interested in critical properties and we prove, in…
We consider a variational problem with boundary singularity and Dirichlet condition. We give a blow-up analysis for sequences of solutions of an equation with exponential nonlinearity. Also, we derive a compactness criterion under some…