Related papers: Reactive glass and vegetation patterns
The history dependence of the glasses formed from flow-melted steady states by a sudden cessation of the shear rate $\dot\gamma$ is studied in colloidal suspensions, by molecular dynamics simulations, and mode-coupling theory. In an ideal…
We study the nonlinear dynamics of a multi-mode random laser using the methods of statistical physics of disordered systems. A replica-symmetry breaking phase transition is predicted as a function of the pump intensity. We thus show that…
Mechanical properties are of central importance to materials sciences, in particular if they depend on external stimuli. Here we investigate the rheological response of amorphous solids, namely col- loidal glasses, to external forces. Using…
We propose that there exists a generic class of glass forming systems that have competing states (of crystalline order or not) which are locally close in energy to the ground state (which is typically unique). Upon cooling, such systems…
Super cooled liquids display increasingly heterogeneous dynamics as temperature is lowered towards the glass transition ($T_{g}$). A hallmark of this dynamical heterogeneity is the spontaneous emergence of cooperative rearranging regions…
We report a detailed experimental study of the structure and dynamics of glassy states in hard spheres with short-range attraction. The system is a suspension of nearly-hard-sphere colloidal particles and non-adsorbing linear polymer which…
Oxide glasses have the structure of disordered covalent networks that are accountable for their mechanical response. Identifying the topological phenomena of the elastic structural response, we statistically backpropagate local regions that…
We show that a family of disordered systems with non-relaxational dynamics may exhibit ``glassy'' behavior at nonzero temperature, although such a behavior appears to be ruled out by a face-value application of mean-field theory.…
Although several theories relate the steep slowdown of glass formers to increasing spatial correlations of some sort, standard static correlation functions show no evidence for this. We present results that reveal for the first time a…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
In the free energy landscape picture of glassy systems, the slow dynamics characteristic of these systems is believed to be due to the existence of a complicated free-energy landscape with many local minima. We show here that for a…
Active glassy matter has recently emerged as a novel class of non-equilibrium soft matter, combining energy-driven, active particle movement with dense and disordered glass-like behavior. Here we review the state-of-the-art in this field…
A simple geometrical characterization of configuration space neighborhoods of local energy minima in spin glass landscapes is found by exhaustive search. Combined with previous Monte Carlo investigations of thermal domain growth, it allows…
Patterned vegetation is a characteristic feature of many dryland ecosystems. While plant densities on the ecosystem-wide scale are typically low, a spatial self-organisation principle leads to the occurrence of alternating patches of high…
Water availability is a major environmental driver affecting riparian and wetland vegetation. The interaction between water table fluctuations and vegetation in a stochastic environment contributes to the complexity of the dynamics of these…
Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…
One of the most interesting phenomena in the soft-matter realm consists in the spontaneous formation of super-molecular structures (microphases) in condition of thermodynamic equilibrium. A simple mechanism responsible for this…
Localised radial patterns have been observed in the vegetation of semi-arid ecosystems, often as localised patches of vegetation or in the form of `fairy circles'. We consider stationary localised radial solutions to a reduced model for…
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…
Spin glasses have competing interactions that lead to a rough energy landscape which is highly susceptible to small perturbations. These chaotic effects strongly affect numerical simulations and, as such, gaining a deeper understanding of…