Related papers: Elasticity near the vulcanization transition
Second-order phase transitions are characterized by a divergence of the spatial correlation length of the order parameter fluctuations. For confined systems, this is known to lead to remarkable equilibrium physical phenomena, including…
We consider the yielding behavior of amorphous solids under cyclic shear deformation and show that it can be mapped into a random walk in a confining potential with an absorbing boundary. The resulting dynamics is governed by the first…
We model a sheared disordered solid using the theory of Shear Transformation Zones (STZs). In this mean-field continuum model the density of zones is governed by an effective temperature that approaches a steady state value as energy is…
Turbulent mixing and entrainment at the boundary of a cloud is studied by means of direct numerical simulations that couple the Eulerian description of the turbulent velocity and water vapor fields with a Lagrangian ensemble of cloud water…
We investigated domain growth in switching processes between the low-spin and high-spin phases in thermally induced hysteresis loops of spin-crossover (SC) solids. Elastic interactions among the molecules induce effective long-range…
In the past fifteen years, flow instabilities reminiscent of the Taylor-like instabilities driven by hoop stresses, have been observed in wormlike micelles based on surfactant molecules. In particular, purely elastic instabilities and…
Crystals with low latent heat are predicted to melt from an entropically stabilized body-centered cubic symmetry. At this weakly first-order transition, strongly correlated fluctuations are expected to emerge, which could change the nature…
The aim of this paper is to offer an analytic theory of the shear banding instability in amorphous solids that are subjected to athermal quasi-static shear. To this aim we derive nonlinear equations for the displacement field, including the…
We derive a microscopic theory for the structural dynamics in the vicinity of the glass transition for a liquid exposed to a one-dimensional periodic potential. The periodic potential breaks translational invariance, in particular, the…
If quenched fast enough, a liquid is able to avoid crystallization and will remain in a metastable supercooled state down to the glass transition, with an important increase in viscosity upon further cooling. There are important differences…
Experiments on spherical particles in a 3D Couette cell vibrated from below and sheared from above show a hysteretic freezing/melting transition. Under sufficient vibration a crystallized state is observed, which can be melted by sufficient…
We study the fully nonlinear, nonlocal dynamics of two-dimensional multicomponent vesicles in a shear flow with matched viscosity of the inner and outer fluids. Using a nonstiff, pseudo-spectral boundary integral method, we investigate…
We study the rheology of amorphous solids in the limit of negligible thermal fluctuations. On the basis of general arguments, the flow curve is shown to result from an interplay between the time scales of the macroscopic driving and the…
We report on experimentally observed shear stress fluctuations in both granular solid and fluid states, showing that they are non-Gaussian at low shear rates, reflecting the predominance of correlated structures (force chains) in the…
The shear-transformation-zone (STZ) theory of plastic deformation predicts that sufficiently soft, non-crystalline solids are linearly unstable against forming periodic arrays of microstructural shear bands. A limited nonlinear analysis…
The transverse momentum per particle, $[p_t]$, fluctuates event by event in ultrarelativistic nucleus-nucleus collisions, for a given multiplicity. These fluctuations are small and approximately Gaussian, but a non-zero skewness has been…
The behavior of granular media under quasi-static loading has recently been shown to attain a stable evolution state corresponding to a manifold in the space of micromechanical variables. This state is characterized by sudden transitions…
The glass transition remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of contemporary condensed matter physics. When crystallization is bypassed by rapid cooling, a supercooled liquid, retaining amorphous particle arrangment, results. The…
Spontaneous strain localization occurs during mechanical tests of a model amorphous solid simulated using molecular dynamics. The degree of localization depends upon the extent of structural relaxation prior to mechanical testing. In the…
The spontaneous formation of droplets via dewetting of a thin fluid film from a solid substrate allows for materials nanostructuring, under appropriate experimental control. While thermal fluctuations are expected to play a role in this…