Related papers: Reactive glass and vegetation patterns
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…
Chemical gardens are mineral aggregates that grow in three dimensions with plant-like forms and share properties with self-assembled structures like nano-scale tubes, brinicles or chimneys at hydrothermal vents. The analysis of their shapes…
Fossil amber offers the unique opportunity of investigating an amorphous material which has been exploring its energy landscape for more than 110 Myears of natural aging. By applying different x-ray scattering methods to amber before and…
Localised patterns are often observed in models for dryland vegetation, both as peaks of vegetation in a desert state and as gaps within a vegetated state, known as `fairy circles'. Recent results from radial spatial dynamics show that…
Spatial patterns arising spontaneously due to internal processes are ubiquitous in nature, varying from regular patterns of dryland vegetation to complex structures of bacterial colonies. Many of these patterns can be explained in the…
Vast landscapes extending from southern Angola, Namibia, and South Africa exhibit localised barren patches of vegetation called fairy circles. They consist of isolated or randomly distributed circular areas devoid of any vegetation. They…
The rheological behavior of soft glassy materials basically results from the interplay between shearing forces and an intrinsic slow dynamics. This competition can be described by a microscopic theory, which can be viewed as a…
Granular media jam into a panoply of metastable states. The way in which these states are achieved depends on the nature of local and global constraints on grains; here we investigate this issue by means of a non-equilibrium stochastic…
Glasses exhibit a liquid-like structure but a solid-like rheological response with plastic deformations only occurring beyond yielding. Thus, predicting the rheological behavior from the microscopic structure is difficult, but important for…
While diffusion in crystalline solids is quantitatively understood through defect-mediated atomic hops, no comparable quantitative framework exists for glasses. In these systems, the origin of large diffusion activation energies remains…
The fragility, that controls the temperature-dependent viscous properties of liquids as the glass transition is approached, in various glass-forming liquids with different atomic interactions and densities is investigated by molecular…
Active systems are comprised of constituents with interactions that are generically non-reciprocal in nature. Such non-reciprocity often gives rise to situations where conflicting objectives exist, such as in the case of a predator pursuing…
We discuss the behavior of a crystalline surface with a disordered substrate. We focus on the possible existence of a {\em super-rough} glassy phase, with height-height correlation functions which vary as the square logarithm of the…
Drylands are pattern-forming systems showing self-organized vegetation patchiness, multiplicity of stable states and fronts separating domains of alternative stable states. Pattern dynamics, induced by droughts or disturbances, can result…
Apart from not having crystallized, supercooled liquids can be considered as being properly equilibrated and thus can be described by a few thermodynamic control variables. In contrast, glasses and other amorphous solids can be arbitrarily…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
We study thermally activated dynamics using functional renormalization within the field theory of randomly pinned elastic systems, a prototype for glasses. It appears through an essentially non-perturbative boundary layer in the running…
We study pattern formation in a chemotaxis model of bacteria and soil carbon dynamics as an example system where transient dynamics can give rise to pattern formation outside of Turing unstable regimes. We use a detailed analysis of the…
In glass forming liquids close to the glass transition point, even a very slight increase in the macroscopic density results in a dramatic slowing down of the macroscopic relaxation. Concomitantly, the local density itself fluctuates in…
Complex spatiotemporal structures develop during the process of aging glasses after cooling and of rejuvenating glasses upon heating. The key to understanding these structures is the interplay between the activated reconfiguration events…