Related papers: Aging process of electrical contacts in granular m…
The interaction between dust grains is an important process in fields as diverse as planetesimal formation or the plasma processing of silicon wafers into computer chips. This interaction depends in large part on the material properties of…
Frustration arises for a broad class of physical systems where confinement (geometric) or the presence of a perturbation (kinematic) prevents equilibration to a minimum energy state. By varying the diameter ratio and packing fraction in…
Granular convergence is a property of a granular pack as it is repeatedly sheared in a cyclic, quasistatic fashion, as the packing configuration changes via discrete events. Under suitable conditions the set of microscopic configurations…
Colloidal gels undergo a phenomenon known as physical aging, i.e., a continuous change of their physical properties with time after the gel point. To date, most of the research effort on aging in gels has been focused on suspensions of hard…
We present several numerical results on granular mixtures. In particular, we examine the efficiency of diffusion as a mixing mechanism in these systems. The collisions are inelastic and to compensate the energy loss, we thermalize the…
One of the oldest and most intriguing problems in the handling of materials is how a collection of solid grains packs together. While granular packing is normally determined by how grains are poured or shaken, we find that a systematic and…
Confined thin structures are ubiquitous in nature. Spatial and length constraints have led to a number of novel packing strategies at both the micro-scale, as when DNA packages inside a capsid, and the macro-scale, seen in plant root…
We use computer simulations to study the dynamics of a physical gel at high densities where gelation and the glass transition interfere. We report and provide detailed physical understanding of complex relaxation patterns for time…
Slow relaxation occurs in many physical and biological systems. `Creep' is an example from everyday life: when stretching a rubber band, for example, the recovery to its equilibrium length is not, as one might think, exponential: the…
The sticking of a soft polystyrene colloidal particle to a planar glass plate was studied by a microrheological technique using an optical tweezer to trap the particle and a piezoelectric-stage to position the plate and to sinusoidally…
This study demonstrates that the free-surface flow dynamics of dense piles of contactless silica microparticles depend on the resting period prior to flow. Microfluidic rotating drum experiments reveal that longer resting times lead to…
W-based granular metals have been prepared by electron beam induced deposition from the tungsten-hexacarbonyl W(CO)6 precursor. In situ electrical conductivity measurements have been performed to monitor the growth process and to…
The long-time dynamics of the critical contact process which is brought suddenly out of an uncorrelated initial state undergoes ageing in close analogy with quenched magnetic systems. In particular, we show through Monte Carlo simulations…
My analysis uses methods developed for data mining microarray experiments, adapted for ageing research. Methods bridge knowledge of statistical mechanics with data mining methods developed in statistical mathematics. Analyses can reveal how…
Disordered materials are often out of equilibrium and evolve very slowly. This allows a memory of the imposed strains or preparation conditions to be encoded in the material. Here we consider "directed aging", where the elastic properties…
We report on zero field cooled magnetization relaxation experiments on a concen- trated frozen ferrofluid exhibiting a low temperature superspin glass transition. With a method initially developed for spin glasses, we investigate the field…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
Aging phenomena have been studied in very different materials like polymers, supercooled liquids or disordered orientational crystals. We recall here the main features of aging in spin glasses, and use this example of magnetic systems as a…
The early planetesimal growth proceeds through a sequence of sticking collisions of dust agglomerates. Very uncertain is still the relative velocity regime in which growth rather than destruction can take place. The outcome of a collision…
We study the dynamic behaviour of concentrated colloidal hard spheres using Time Resolved Correlation, a light scattering technique that can detect the slow evolution of the dynamics in out-of-equilibrium systems. Surprisingly, equilibrium…