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Dynamical instabilities in fluid mechanics are responsible of a variety of important common phenomena, such as waves on the sea surface or Taylor vorteces in Couette flow. In granular media dynamical instabilities has just begun to be…
Patterns are quotidian in nature. Distinct multiscale patterns are generally a consequence of nonequilibrium dynamical processes associated with mechanical or hydrodynamic instabilities. In this thesis, I report experimental investigations…
Experiments on quasistatic crack propagation in gelatin hydrogels reveal a new branching instability triggered by wetting the tip opening with a drop of aqueous solvent less viscous than the bulk one. We show that the emergence of unstable…
The process of frictional rupture, i.e. the failure of frictional systems, abounds in the technological and natural world around us, ranging from squealing car brake pads to earthquakes along geological faults. A general framework for…
Zonal jets are striking and beautiful examples of the propensity for geophysical turbulent flows to spontaneously self-organize into robust, large scale coherent structures. There exist many dynamical mechanisms for the formation of zonal…
Fully localised patterns involving cellular hexagons or squares have been found experimentally and numerically in various continuum models. However, there is currently no mathematical theory for the emergence of these localised cellular…
Crackling dynamics is characterized by a release of incoming energy through intermittent avalanches. The shape, i.e. the internal temporal structure of these avalanches, gives insightful information about the physical processes involved. It…
The description of almost periodic or quasiperiodic structures has a long tradition in mathematical physics, in particular since the discovery of quasicrystals in the early 80's. Frequently, the modelling of such structures leads to…
It is known that a finite-size homogeneous granular fluid develops an hydrodynamic-like instability when dissipation crosses a threshold value. This instability is analyzed in terms of modified hydrodynamic equations: first, a source term…
We report experimental observations of hexaroll chaos in inclined layer convection. Two separate populations of defect complexes characterize the defect turbulent state, one the classical penta-hepta defect of hexagonal planform patterns,…
We investigate the microscopic origin of water's anomalies by inspecting the hydrogen bond network (HBN) and the spatial organization of low-density-liquid (LDL) like and high-density-liquid (HDL) like environments. Specifically, we…
We investigate the behavior of colloidal suspensions with different volume fractions confined between parallel walls under a range of steady shears. We model the particles using molecular dynamics (MD) with full hydrodynamic interactions…
The present paper demonstrates how a natural crack mosaic resembling a random tessellation evolves with repeated 'wetting followed by drying' cycles. The natural system here is a crack network in a drying colloidal material, for example, a…
Fractal structures appear in a vast range of physical systems. A literature survey including all experimental papers on fractals which appeared in the six Physical Review journals (A-E and Letters) during the 1990's shows that experimental…
The emergence of fractionalized quasiparticles in quantum spin liquids has served a wealth of unconventional phenomena in frustrated magnets. In our work, we explore the various domain patterns of such fractionalized quasiparticles,…
Theoretical considerations are made of superfluid turbulence in the Kelvin wave cascade regime at low temperatures (T < 1K) and length scales of the order or smaller than the intervortical distance. The energy spectrum is shown to be in…
We formulate and model the dynamics of spatial patterns arising during the precipitation of calcium carbonate from a supersaturated shallow water flow. The model describes the formation of travertine deposits at geothermal hot springs and…
We investigate the scaling properties of the sources of crackling noise in a fully-dynamic numerical model of sedimentary rocks subject to uniaxial compression. The model is initiated by filling a cylindrical container with randomly-sized…
Active matter systems display a fascinating range of dynamical states, including stationary patterns and turbulent phases. While the former can be tackled with methods from the field of pattern formation, the spatio-temporal disorder of the…
We investigate the dynamical evolution of a thermodynamically unstable crystal surface into a hill-and-valley structure. We demonstrate that, for quasi one-dimensional ordering, the equation of motion maps exactly to the modified…