Related papers: Stationary state volume fluctuations in a granular…
The collective behaviour of statistical systems close to critical points is characterized by an extremely slow dynamics which, in the thermodynamic limit, eventually prevents them from relaxing to an equilibrium state after a change in the…
We complete our study of the selfgravitating gas by computing the fluctuations around the saddle point solution for the three statistical ensembles. Although the saddle point is the same for the three ensembles, the fluctuations change from…
We consider a toy model for glassy dynamics of colloidal suspensions: a single Brownian particle diffusing among immobile obstacles. If Gaussian factorization of static density fluctuations is assumed, this model can be solved without…
Unlike macroscopic multistable mechanical systems such as snap bracelets or elastic shells that must be physically manipulated into various conformations, microscopic systems can undergo spontaneous conformation switching between…
When a physical system evolves in a thermal bath at a constant temperature, it arrives eventually to an equilibrium state whose properties are independent of the kinetic parameters and of the precise evolution scenario. This is generically…
We perform experiments with a granular system that consists of a collection of identical hollow spheres (ping-pong balls). Particles rest on a horizontal metallic grid and are confined within a circular region. Fluidization is achieved by…
We discuss the thermodynamics of a gas of free particles obeying Haldane's exclusion statistics, deriving low temperature and low density expansions. For gases with a constant density of states, we derive an exact equation of state and find…
We search for steady states in a class of fluctuating and driven physical systems that exhibit sustained currents. We find that the physical concept of a steady state, well known for systems at equilibrium, must be generalised to describe…
Spatial fluctuations of the local electric field induced by a constant applied electric field in composite media are studied analytically and numerically. It is found that the density of states for the fields exhibit sharp peaks and abrupt…
Discrete element numerical simulations of unsteady, homogeneous shear flows have been performed by instantly applying a constant shear rate to a random, static, isotropic assembly of identical, soft, frictional spheres at either zero or…
We study heterogeneities in a binary Lennard-Jones system below the glass transition using molecular dynamics simulations. We identify mobile and immobile particles and measure their distribution of vibrational amplitudes. For temperatures…
The existence of fluctuations of temperature has been a somewhat controversial topic in thermodynamics but nowadays it is recognized that they must be taken into account in small, finite systems. Although for nonequilibrium steady states…
In this paper we investigate the possibility of a dynamical definition of an effective temperature for compacting granular media in the framework of the Fluctuation-Dissipation (FD) relations. We have studied two paradigmatic models for the…
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…
We investigate the statistics of the fluctuations of the energy transfer between an overdamped Brownian particle, whose motion is confined by a stationary harmonic potential, and a surrounding viscoelastic fluid at constant temperature. We…
We investigate the number fluctuations of spatially split many-boson systems employing a theorem about the maximally and minimally attainable variances of an observable. The number fluctuations of many-boson systems are given for different…
The behavior of the most probable values of the order parameter $x$ and the amplitude $\phi$ of conjugate force fluctuations is studied for a stochastic system with a colored multiplicative noise with absorbing states. The phase diagrams…
We study a gas of hard rods on a ring, driven by an external thermostat, with either elastic or inelastic collisions, which exhibits sub-diffusive behavior $<x^2 > \sim t^{1/2}$. We show the validity of the usual Fluctuation-Dissipation…
Equation of state for systems with particles self-assembling into aggregates is derived within a mesoscopic theory combining density functional and field-theoretic approaches. We focus on the effect of mesoscopic fluctuations in the…
We consider a system of $N$ disordered mean-field interacting diffusions within spatial constraints: each particle $\theta_i$ is attached to one site $x_i$ of a periodic lattice and the interaction between particles $\theta_i$ and…