Related papers: Granular and Nano-Elasticity
In a recent paper [Phys. Rev. X 12, 031021], we reported experimental observations of ``ultrastable'' states in a shear-jammed granular system subjected to small-amplitude cyclic shear. In such states, all the particle positions and contact…
We study fluctuations in the drag force experienced by an object moving through a granular medium. The successive formation and collapse of jammed states give a stick-slip nature to the fluctuations which are periodic at small depths but…
Mechanical densification of granular bodies is a process in which a loose material becomes increasingly cohesive as the applied pressure increases. A constitutive description of this process faces the formidable problem that granular and…
Some remarkable generic properties, related to isostaticity and potential energy minimization, of equilibrium configurations of assemblies of rigid, frictionless grains are studied. Isostaticity -the uniqueness of the forces, once the list…
Assemblies of purely repulsive and frictionless particles, such as emulsions or hard spheres, display very curious properties near their jamming transition, which occurs at the random close packing for mono-disperse spheres. Although such…
Quasi-static strain-controlled measurements of stress vs strain curves in macroscopic amorphous solids result in a nonlinear looking curve that ends up either in mechanical collapse or in a steady-state with fluctuations around a mean…
Although fully elastic when static, granular media become transiently elastic when being slowly sheared -- during which both the elastic energy and stress relax. Starting from this observation, we cogently derive the framework for granular…
The theory, the design and the experimental validation of a catastrophe machine based on a flexible element are addressed for the first time. A general theoretical framework is developed by extending that of the classical catastrophe…
Entropic forces play a fundamental role in nanoscale phenomena, from colloidal self-assembly to biomolecular disaggregation. Here, we develop an exact analytical theory and find general scaling laws for the entropic separation of…
Nucleation, commonly associated with discontinuous transformations between metastable and stable phases, is crucial in fields as diverse as atmospheric science and nanoscale electronics. Traditionally, it is considered a microscopic process…
Mechanical deformation of amorphous solids can be described as consisting of an elastic part in which the stress increases linearly with strain, up to a yield point at which the solid either fractures or starts deforming plastically. It is…
Understanding nanomechanical response of materials represents a scientific challenge. Here, we have used in-situ electron microscopy to reveal drastic for the first time changes of structural behavior during deformation of 1-nm-wide metal…
Non-Euclidean plates are a subset of the class of elastic bodies having no stress-free configuration. Such bodies exhibit residual stress when relaxed from all external constraints, and may assume complicated equilibrium shapes even in the…
Fluctuations of the instantaneous local Lagrangian strain $\epsilon_{ij}(\bf{r},t)$, measured with respect to a static ``reference'' lattice, are used to obtain accurate estimates of the elastic constants of model solids from atomistic…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, foams etc. are ubiquitous in our daily life, as well as in industrial and geotechnical applications. Although these disordered systems form stable structures if unperturbed, in practice they do…
We investigate the emergence of the continuum elastic limit from the atomistic description of matter at zero temperature considering how locally defined elastic quantities depend on the coarse graining length scale. Results obtained…
Stochastic models for pore collapse in granular materials are developed. First, a general fluctuating stress-strain relation for a plastic flow rule is derived. The fluctuations account for non-associativity in plastic deformations…
The relation between force and stretch in the worm-like chain model of entropic elasticity is examined. Although no closed-form expression is valid for all values of forcing, solutions in the form of asymptotic series can be obtained under…
Nanoscale materials display enhanced strength and toughness but also larger fluctuations and more pronounced size effects with respect to their macroscopic counterparts. Here we study the system size-dependence of the failure strength…
We investigate the formation of stripe patterns that appear on the surface of a dry granular system as the container is deformed very slowly. In an experimental study using nearly mono-disperse glass beads, we found that many faults develop…