Related papers: Heterogeneities in Aging Models of Granular Compac…
We provide a theoretical perspective on the glass transition in molecular liquids at thermal equilibrium, on the spatially heterogeneous and aging dynamics of disordered materials, and on the rheology of soft glassy materials. We start with…
The physical behavior of glass-forming liquids presents complex features of both dynamic and thermodynamic nature. Some studies indicate the presence of thermodynamic anomalies and of crossovers in the dynamic properties, but their origin…
A kinetic model for the Boltzmann equation is proposed and explored as a practical means to investigate the properties of a dilute granular gas. It is shown that all spatially homogeneous initial distributions approach a universal…
Active matter, responsive ("smart") materials and materials under time-dependent load are systems out of thermal equilibrium. To construct coarse-grained models for such systems, one needs to integrate out a distribution of microstates that…
Many-body systems relaxing to equilibrium can exhibit complex dynamics even if their steady state is trivial. At low temperatures or high densities their evolution is often dominated by steric hindrances affecting particle motion [1,2,3].…
To study materials phenomena simultaneously at various length scales, descriptions in which matter can be coarse grained to arbitrary levels, are necessary. Attempts to do this in the static regime (i.e. zero temperature) have already been…
Using molecular dynamics simulations, we study the slow dynamics of supercooled liquids confined in a random matrix of immobile obstacles. We study the dynamical crossover from glass-like to Lorentz-gas-like behavior in terms of the density…
Understanding and controlling physical aging, i.e. the spontaneous temporal evolution of out-of-equilibrium systems, represents one of the greatest tasks in material science. Recent studies have revealed the existence of a complex atomic…
Kinetically constrained models (KCMs) were introduced by physicists to model the liquid-glass transition. They are interacting particle systems on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ in which each element of $\mathbb{Z}^d$ can be in state 0 or 1 and tries to…
We study K-processes, which are Markov processes in a denumerable state space, all of whose elements are stable, with the exception of a single state, starting from which the process enters finite sets of stable states with uniform…
The dynamics of the 2D Coulomb glass model is investigated by kinetic Monte Carlo simulation. An exponential divergence of the relaxation time signals a zero-temperature freezing transition. At low temperatures the dynamics of the system is…
Many features of granular media can be modelled as a fluid of hard spheres with {\em inelastic} collisions. Under rapid flow conditions, the macroscopic behavior of grains can be described through hydrodynamic equations. At low-density, a…
When applied to binary solutions, thermal gradients lead to the generation of concentration-gradients and thus to inhomogeneous systems. While being known for more than 150 years, the molecular origins for this phenomenon are still debated,…
By considering the constrained motion of classical spins in a geometrically frustrated magnet, we find a dynamical freezing temperature below which the system gets trapped in metastable states with a "frozen" moment and dynamical…
Many systems, including polymers and molecular liquids, when adequately cooled and/or compressed, solidify into a disordered solid, i.e., a glass. The~transition is not abrupt, featuring progressive decrease of the microscopic mobility and…
We investigate the low-temperature dynamics of a simple stochastic model, introduced recently in the context of the physics of glasses. The slowest characteristic time at equilibrium diverges exponentially at low temperature. On smaller…
The Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) method has become an important tool for examination of phenomena like surface diffusion and thin film growth because of its ability to carry out simulations for time scales that are relevant to experiments. But…
The effect of cyclic loading on relaxation dynamics and mechanical properties of metallic glasses is studied using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider the Kob-Andersen three-dimensional binary mixture rapidly cooled across the glass…
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…
In this thesis, we investigate the emergence of kinetic processes in finite quantum systems. We first generalize the Redfield theory to describe the dynamics of a small quantum system weakly interacting with an environment of finite heat…