Related papers: Force heterogeneities in particle assemblies: From…
Disordered systems like liquids, gels, glasses, or granular materials are not only ubiquitous in daily life and in industrial applications but they are also crucial for the mechanical stability of cells or the transport of chemical and…
Heterogeneity is classified in five categories---topologic, geometric, kinematic, static, and constitutive---and the first four categories are investigated in a numerical DEM simulation of biaxial compression. The simulation experiments…
Jammed particulate systems, such as granular media, colloids, and foams, interact via one-sided forces that are nonzero only when particles overlap. We find that systems with one-sided repulsive interactions possess no linear response…
The close packing density of log-normal and bimodal distributed, surface-adsorbed particles or discs in 2D is studied by numerical simulation. For small spread in particle size, the system orders in a polycrystalline structure of hexagonal…
A wide variety of interacting particle assemblies driven by an external force are characterized by a transition between a blocked and a moving phase. The origin of this deblocking transition can be traced back to the presence of either…
In this paper, we review the recent activity of our group on the study of disorder effects on systems displaying phase coherence. These studies have focused on both the electronic transport through mesoscopic metallic spin glasses, and cold…
Mutually repelling particles form spontaneously ordered clusters when forced into confinement. The clusters may adopt similar spatial arrangements even if the underlying particle interactions are contrastingly different. Here we demonstrate…
Force chains form heterogeneous physical structures that can constrain the mechanical stability and acoustic transmission of granular media. However, despite their relevance for predicting bulk properties of materials, there is no agreement…
We determine the speed of a crystallisation (or more generally, a solidification) front as it advances into the uniform liquid phase after the system has been quenched into the crystalline region of the phase diagram. We calculate the front…
In this paper I show how the statistics of the gravitational field is changed when the system is characterized by a non-uniform distribution of particles. I show how the distribution functions W(dF/dt) giving the joint probability that a…
Amorphous solids relax via slow molecular rearrangement induced by thermal fluctuations or applied stress. Although microscopic structural signatures predicting these structural relaxations have long been sought, a physically motivated…
We investigate the dynamics of a three-state stochastic lattice gas, consisting of holes and two oppositely "charged" species of particles, under the influence of an "electric" field, at zero total charge. Interacting only through an…
Jammed packings' mechanical properties depend sensitively on their detailed local structure. Here we provide a complete characterization of the pair correlation close to contact and of the force distribution of jammed frictionless spheres.…
Cooperative scattering of light by an extended object such as an atomic ensemble or a dielectric sphere is fundamentally different from scattering from many point-like scatterers such as single atoms. Homogeneous distributions tend to…
The formation of correlated structures is of importance in many diverse contexts such as strongly coupled plasmas, soft matter, and even biological mediums. In all these contexts the dynamics are mainly governed by electrostatic…
Using numerical simulations, we study the dynamical evolution of particles interacting via competing long-range repulsion and short-range attraction in two dimensions. The particles are compressed using a time-dependent quasi-one…
We present an extension of the continuous damage fiber bundle model to describe the gradual degradation of highly heterogeneous materials under an increasing external load. Breaking of a fiber in the model is preceded by a sequence of…
Due to significant computational expense, discrete element method simulations of jammed packings of size-dispersed spheres with size ratios greater than 1:10 have remained elusive, limiting the correspondence between simulations and…
The postulate of the existence of a jamming phase diagram (Liu and Nagel, Nature 396, 21 EP (1998aa)) provides a theoretical basis for the classification of a wide range of amorphous solids (colloidal, molecular and emulsion glasses,…
Dense packings composed of irregular polyhedral particles are investigated by numerical simulations under quasistatic triaxial compression. The Contact Dynamics method is used for this investigation with 40 000 particles. The effect of…