Related papers: Elasticity near the vulcanization transition
Local rearrangements are the elements of plastic deformation in an amorphous solid. In oscillatory shear, they can switch reversibly between two distinct configurations. While these repeating relaxations are typically considered in the…
The slow flow of amorphous solids exhibits striking heterogeneities: swift localised particle rearrangements take place in the midst of a more or less homogeneously deforming medium. Recently, experimental as well as numerical work has…
Nearly all dense suspensions undergo dramatic and abrupt thickening transitions in their flow behaviour when sheared at high stresses. Such transitions occur when the dominant interactions between the suspended particles shift from…
We investigate thermal avalanche dynamics in amorphous solids using elastoplastic models with local activation rules and no external driving. Dynamical heterogeneities, quantified through persistence measurements and the associated…
Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic…
We study the rheology of amorphous packings of soft, frictionless particles close to jamming. Implementing a quasistatic simulation method we generate a well defined ensemble of states that directly samples the system at its yield-stress. A…
Simulations of the structure and dynamics of fluid films confined to a thickness of a few molecular diameters are described. Confining walls introduce layering and in-plane order in the adjacent fluid. The latter is essential to transfer of…
In amorphous materials, plasticity is localized and occurs as shear transformations. It was recently shown by Wu et al. that these shear transformations can be predicted by applying topological defect concepts developed for liquid crystals…
We present a novel picture of a non isothermal solidification process starting from a molecular level, where the microscopic origin of the basic mechanisms and of the instabilities characterizing the approach to equilibrium is rendered more…
Tightly packed granular particles under shear often exhibit intriguing intermittencies, specifically, sudden stress drops that we refer to as quaking. To probe the nature of this phenomenon, we prototype a circular shear cell that is…
By minimizing the enthalpy of packings of frictionless particles, we obtain jammed solids at desired pressures and hence investigate the jamming transition with and without shear. Typical scaling relations of the jamming transition are…
We use the shear transformation zone (STZ) theory of dynamic plasticity to study the necking instability in a two-dimensional strip of amorphous solid. Our Eulerian description of large-scale deformation allows us to follow the instability…
Partial localization is the phenomenon of self-aggregation of mass into high-density structures that are thin in one direction and extended in the others. We give a detailed study of an energy functional that arises in a simplified model…
We study a mesoscopic model for the flow of amorphous solids. The model is based on the key features identified at the microscopic level, namely peri- ods of elastic deformation interspersed with localised rearrangements of parti- cles that…
Amorphous solids are known to fail catastrophically and in some situations, nano-scaled cavities are believed to play a significant role in the failure. In a recent work, using numerical simulations, we have shown the correspondence between…
Addition of particles to a viscoelastic suspension dramatically alters the properties of the mixture, particularly when it is sheared or otherwise processed. Shear-induced stretching of the polymers results in elastic stress that causes a…
We propose a scaling ansatz for the elastic energy of a system near the critical jamming transition in terms of three relevant fields: the compressive strain $\Delta \phi$ relative to the critical jammed state, the shear strain $\epsilon$,…
Quasi-static strain-controlled measurements of stress vs strain curves in macroscopic amorphous solids result in a nonlinear looking curve that ends up either in mechanical collapse or in a steady-state with fluctuations around a mean…
Discontinuous shear thickening (DST) is associated with a sharp rise of a suspension's viscosity with increasing applied shear rate. A key signature of DST, highlighted in recent studies, is the very large fluctuations of the measured…
Disordered solids respond to quasistatic shear with intermittent avalanches of plastic activity, an example of the crackling noise observed in many nonequilibrium critical systems. The temporal power spectrum of activity within disordered…