Related papers: Can one make a powder forget its history?
We consider a one-dimensional system with particles having either positive or negative velocity, which annihilate on contact. To the ballistic motion of the particle, a diffusion is superimposed. The annihilation may represent a reaction in…
When glassy materials are rapidly quenched from the liquid to the solid state upon flow cessation or cooling, they solidify in an out-of-equilibrium configuration, retaining the memory of the processing conditions for very long times. This…
Crumpling an ordinary thin sheet transforms it into a structure with unusual mechanical behaviors, such as enhanced rigidity, emission of crackling noise, slow relaxations, and memory retention. A central challenge in explaining these…
We simulate a two dimensional model of self-propelled particles confined by a deformable boundary. The particles tend to accumulate near the boundary and the shape of the boundary deforms upon the collisions. We find that there are two…
For fundamentally characterizing the effect of hierarchical structure in granular matter, a set of compression-relaxation tests for dust particles and glass beads confined in a cylindrical cell was performed. Typical diameter of both grains…
Structurally disordered materials continue to pose fundamental questions, including that of how different disordered phases ("polyamorphs") can coexist and transform from one to another. As a widely studied case, amorphous silicon (a-Si)…
Multiple transient memories, originally discovered in charge-density-wave conductors, are a remarkable and initially counterintuitive example of how a system can store information about its driving. In this class of memories, a system can…
The thesis deals with the first stage of planet formation, namely dust coagulation from micron to millimeter sizes in circumstellar disks. For the first time, we collect and compile the recent laboratory experiments on dust aggregates into…
We present a methodology for simulating dilute suspensions of particles settling under gravity, with the main purpose of overcoming limitations of triply periodic configurations, mainly the strong vertical correlation that hinders the study…
A range of percolation models of cluster systems of composites is discussed. In the models the parameters of the clusters of a substance and inner boundaries were obtained by the Monte Carlo method, and the possibility of affecting the…
Cometary dust particles are remnants of the primordial accretion of refractory material that occurred during the initial stages of the Solar System formation. Understanding their physical structure can help constrain their accretion…
The computational complexity of internal diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) is examined from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. We show that for two or more dimensions, the problem of predicting the cluster from a given set…
We simulate the collision of atomic clusters with a weakly attractive surface using molecular dynamics in a regime between soft-landing and fragmentation, where the cluster undergoes large deformation but remains intact. As a function of…
When poured into a container, cohesive granular materials form low-density, open granular aggregates. If pressed upon with a ram, these aggregates densify by particle rearrangement. Here we introduce experimental evidence to the effect that…
Cessation of flow in simple yield stress fluids results in a complex stress relaxation process that depends on the preceding flow conditions and leads to finite residual stresses. To assess the microscopic origin of this phenomenon, we…
The mixing of a powder of 10-50{\mu}m primary particles into a liquid to form a dispersion with the highest possible solid content is a common industrial operation. Building on recent advances in the rheology of such 'granular dispersions',…
Numerical simulations of positively-buoyant suspension in a horizontally rotating cylinder were performed to study the formation of radial and axial patterns. The order parameter for low-frequency segregated phase and dispersed phase is…
Granular material in a swirled container exhibits a curious transition as the number of particles is increased: at low densities the particle cluster rotates in the same direction as the swirling motion of the container, while at high…
There are two modes by which clusters of aggregating particles can coalesce: The clusters can merge either (i) by the Ostwald ripening process in which particles diffuse from one cluster to the other whilst the cluster centres remain…
The quasistatic behavior of a simple 2D model of a cohesive powder under isotropic loads is investigated by Discrete Element simulations. The loose packing states, as studied in a previous paper, undergo important structural changes under…