Related papers: Shaking a Box of Sand
Two models are presented to study the influence of slow dynamics on granular compaction. It is found in both cases that high values of packing fraction are achieved only by the slow relaxation of cooperative structures. Ongoing work to…
Slow dynamic nonlinearity describes a poorly understood, creep-like phenomena that occurs in brittle composite materials such as rocks and cement. It is characterized by a drop in stiffness induced by a mechanical conditioning, followed by…
The glass transition is considered within two toys models, a mean field spin glass and a directed polymer in a correlated random potential. In the spin glass model there occurs a dynamical transition, where the system condenses in a state…
The glassy dynamics of soft harmonic spheres is often mapped onto the dynamics of hard spheres by considering an effective diameter for the soft particles and therefore an effective packing fraction. While in this approach the thermal…
We investigate how structural relaxation in mixtures with strong dynamical asymmetry is affected by the microscopic dynamics. Brownian and Newtonian dynamics simulations of dense mixtures of fast and slow hard spheres reveal a striking…
The synergetic approach proposed here is based on characteristic instability of chemical bonding in the form of the bond wave considered as the spatiotemporal correlation between the elementary acts of bond exchange. In frames of the model,…
A simple, non-disordered spin model has been studied in an effort to understand the origin of the precipitous slowing down of dynamics observed in supercooled liquids approaching the glass transition. A combination of Monte Carlo…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and food grains are ubiquitous in civil engineering, geoscience, agriculture, and medicine. While the influence of friction between the grains on the static structure of these systems is well…
A molecular level analysis of segmental trajectories obtained from molecular dynamics simulations is used to obtain the full relaxation time spectrum in aging polymer glasses subject to three different deformation protocols. As in…
Recent work on particle-based models of tissues has suggested that any finite rate of cell division and cell death is sufficient to fluidize an epithelial tissue. At the same time, experimental evidence has indicated the existence of glassy…
We study the off equilibrium dynamics of a mean field disordered systems which can be interpreted both as a long range interaction spin glass and as a particle in a random potential. The statics of this problem is well known and exhibits a…
We investigate aging in glassy systems based on a simple model, where a point in configuration space performs thermally activated jumps between the minima of a random energy landscape. The model allows us to show explicitly a subaging…
The `soft glassy rheology' (SGR) model gives an appealing account of the flow of nonergodic soft materials in terms of the local yield dynamics of mesoscopic elements. Newtonian, power-law, and yield-stress fluid regimes arise on varying a…
The physics of highly excited Rydberg atoms is governed by blockade or exclusion interactions that hinder the excitation of atoms in the proximity of a previously excited one. This leads to cooperative effects and a relaxation dynamics…
We use light microscopy to investigate the aging dynamics of a glass made of closely packed soft spheres, following a rapid transition from a fluid to a solid-like state. By measuring time-resolved, coarse-grained displacements fields, we…
Cell motion inside dense tissues governs many biological processes, including embryonic development and cancer metastasis, and recent experiments suggest that these tissues exhibit collective glassy behavior. To make quantitative…
On the basis of long simulations of a binary mixture of soft spheres just below the glass transition, we make an exploratory study of the activated processes that contribute to the dynamics. We concentrate on statistical measures of the…
Recent experiments have revealed that cytoplasms become glassy when their metabolism is suppressed, while they maintain fluidity in a living state. The mechanism of this active fluidization is not clear, especially for bacterial cytoplasms,…
Despite the enormous theoretical and application interests, a fundamental understanding of the glassy dynamics remains elusive. The static properties of glassy and ordinary liquids are similar, but their dynamics are dramatically different.…
The aging dynamics of colloidal suspensions of Laponite, a synthetic clay, is investigated using dynamic light stattering (DLS) and viscometry after a quench into the glassy phase. DLS allows to follow the diffusion of Laponite particles…