Related papers: Rings and rigidity transitions in network glasses
The effect of disorder on flux lattices at equilibrium is studied quantitatively in the absence of free dislocations using both the Gaussian variational method and the renormalization group. Our results for the mean square relative…
Inspired by the ubiquity of composite filamentous networks in nature we investigate models of biopolymer networks that consist of interconnected floppy and stiff filaments. Numerical simulations carried out in three dimensions allow us to…
We present computer simulations of concentrated solutions of unknotted nonconcatenated semiflexible ring polymers. Unlike in their flexible counterparts, shrinking involves a strong energetic penalty, favoring interpenetration and…
In ordinary solids, material disorder is known to increase the size of the process zone in which stress concentrates at the crack tip, causing a transition from localized to diffuse failure. Here, we report experiments on disordered 2D…
The effect of ring stiffness and pressure on the glassy dynamics of a thermal assembly of two-dimensional ring polymers is investigated using extensive coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. In all cases, dynamical slowing down is…
As a function of connectivity, spring networks exhibit a critical transition between floppy and rigid phases at an isostatic threshold. For connectivity below this threshold, fiber networks were recently shown theoretically to exhibit a…
If quenched fast enough, a liquid is able to avoid crystallization and will remain in a metastable supercooled state down to the glass transition, with an important increase in viscosity upon further cooling. There are important differences…
The transition from a flowing to a static state in a granular material is studied using large-scale, 3D particle simulations. Similar to glasses, this transition is manifested in the development of a plateau in the contact normal force…
The liquid crystalline 11OS5 compound, forming the nematic phase and a few smectic phases, is investigated by broadband dielectric spectroscopy and infra-red spectroscopy. The dielectric relaxation times, ionic conductivity, and positions…
The statistical mechanics of a two-state Ising spin-glass model with finite random connectivity, in which each site is connected to a finite number of other sites, is extended in this work within the replica technique to study the phase…
The mechanical properties of biological materials are spatially heterogeneous. Typical tissues are made up of a spanning fibrous extracellular matrix in which various inclusions, such as living cells, are embedded. While the influence of…
A systematic investigation is presented of grain boundaries and grain boundary networks in two dimensional flexible membranes with crystalline order. An isolated grain boundary undergoes a buckling transition at a critical value of the…
By applying effective medium-style calculations to random spring networks, we demonstrate that internal stresses fundamentally alter the nature of the rigidity transition in disordered materials, changing it from continuous to first-order…
This Ph.D. thesis is divided in two parts. The first one concerns the equilibrium properties of glassy systems. Some aspects of the phenomenology of glasses and of theories attempting to describe them are reviewed in chapter 1. A study of…
The mechanics of disordered fibrous networks such as those that make up the extracellular matrix are strongly dependent on the local connectivity or coordination number. For biopolymer networks this coordination number is typically between…
We model two-dimensional systems of granular aggregates confined between two planes and demonstrate that at a critical grain volume fraction an abrupt rigidity transition occurs. This transition is observed both in static and shear tests.…
We present analytic and numeric results for percolation in a network formed of interdependent spatially embedded networks. We show results for a treelike and a random regular network of networks each with $(i)$ unconstrained interdependent…
At zero temperature, spring networks with connectivity below Maxwell's isostatic threshold undergo a mechanical phase transition from a floppy state at small strains to a rigid state for applied shear strain above a critical strain…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
In many real network systems, nodes usually cooperate with each other and form groups, in order to enhance their robustness to risks. This motivates us to study a new type of percolation, group percolation, in interdependent networks under…