Related papers: Shaking a Box of Sand
We study experimentally the dynamics of a water droplet on a tilted and vertically oscillating rigid fibre. As we vary the frequency and amplitude of the oscillations the droplet transitions between different modes: harmonic pumping,…
We report experimental results on the behavior of an ensemble of inelastically colliding particles, excited by a vibrated piston in a vertical cylinder. When the particle number is increased, we observe a transition from a regime where the…
We study the low temperature dynamics of a two dimensional short-range spin system with uniform ferromagnetic interactions, which displays glassiness at low temperatures despite the absence of disorder or frustration. The model has a dual…
The glassy state is known to undergo slow structural relaxation, where the system progressively explores lower free-energy minima which are either amorphous (ageing) or crystalline (devitrification). Recently, there is growing interest in…
Glassy solids may undergo a fluidization (yielding) transition upon deformation whereby the material starts to flow plastically. It has been a matter of debate whether this process is controlled by a specific time scale, from among…
Examples of glasses are abundant, yet it remains one of the phases of matter whose understanding is very elusive. In recent years, remarkable experiments have been performed on the dynamical aspects of glasses. Electron glasses offer a…
We study by light microscopy a soft glass consisting of a compact arrangement of polydisperse elastic spheres. We show that its slow and non-stationary dynamics results from the unavoidable small fluctuations of temperature, which induce…
Be it to aerate a glass of wine before tasting, to accelerate a chemical reaction or to cultivate cells in suspension, the "swirling" (or orbital shaking) of a container ensures good mixing and gas exchange in an efficient and simple way.…
We propose a dynamical theory of low-temperature shear deformation in amorphous solids. Our analysis is based on molecular-dynamics simulations of a two-dimensional, two-component noncrystalline system. These numerical simulations reveal…
The dynamics of fluid vesicles in simple shear flow is studied using mesoscale simulations of dynamically-triangulated surfaces, as well as a theoretical approach based on two variables, a shape parameter and the inclination angle, which…
Many soft and biological materials display so-called 'soft glassy' dynamics; their constituents undergo anomalous random motions and complex cooperative rearrangements. A recent simulation model of one soft glassy material, a coarsening…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
These lecture notes can be read in two ways. The first two Sections contain a review of the phenomenology of several physical systems with slow nonequilibrium dynamics. In the Conclusions we summarize the scenario derived from the solution…
We investigate dynamical heterogeneities in the collective relaxation of a concentrated microgel system, for which the packing fraction can be conveniently varied by changing the temperature. The packing fraction dependent mechanical…
Recent experiments and simulations have revealed glassy features in the cytoplasm, living tissues as well as dense assemblies of self propelled colloids. This leads to a fundamental question: how do these non-equilibrium (active) amorphous…
The yielding response to an imposed oscillatory shear is investigated for a model two-dimensional dense glass composed of bidisperse, deformable polymer rings, with the ring stiffness being the control parameter. In the quiescent glassy…
We propose a connection between self-similar, focusing dynamics in nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) and macroscopic dynamic features of the glass transition. In particular, we explore the divergence of the appropriate…
The dynamics of structural relaxation in a model polymer glass subject to spatially-homogeneous, time-periodic shear deformation is investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We study a coarse-grained bead-spring model of short…
The dynamics of strongly disordered systems becomes extremely slow or glassy at low temperatures, which results in a characteristic aging scenario. This means that the outcome of measurements strongly depends on the history of the system…
Proposed to study the dynamics of physiological systems in which the evolution depends on the state in a previous time, the Mackey-Glass model exhibits a rich variety of behaviors including periodic or chaotic solutions in vast regions of…