Related papers: How Sandcastles Fall
In this article, we review some of our approaches to granular dynamics, now well known to consist of both fast and slow relaxational processes. In the first case, grains typically compete with each other, while in the second, they…
It is a common belief that power-law distributed avalanches are inherently unpredictable. This idea affects phenomena as diverse as evolution, earthquakes, superconducting vortices, stock markets, etc; from atomic to social scales. It…
Finite size fluctuations are a crucial ingredient in kinetic theory of long-range interacting collisionless systems. In this Letter, we introduce a phenomenological theory which predicts an anomalous scaling close to marginal stability for…
Wind power as clean energy has been widely promoted. However, during the operation of a wind turbine in a mountainous area, a large number of instability phenomena appear in the wind turbine foundation. To study the damage characteristics…
Capillary forces acting at the surface of a liquid drop can be strong enough to deform small objects and recent studies have provided several examples of elastic instabilities induced by surface tension. We present such an example where a…
Model experiments are reported on the build-up of granular piles in two dimensions. These show that as the initial density of falling grains is increased, the resulting pile has decreasing final density and its coordination number…
Fluctuations may govern the fate of an interacting particle system even on the mean-field level. This is demonstrated via a three species cyclic trapping reaction with a large, yet finite number of particles, where the final number of…
Sloped terrains tend to creep downward over time, even when their slope is below the nominal angle of repose. This behavior can result from periodic variations in environmental conditions, such as daily or seasonal fluctuations in…
The manipulation of the self-organized critical systems by repeatedly deliberate local relaxations (fillips) affect considerably the dynamics of avalanches and change their evolution. During a fillip, the energy diffuses to the neighboring…
It is commonly assumed that fluid cannot slip along a solid surface. The experimental evidence generally supports this assumption. We demonstrate that when the change of the relative velocity of a fluid and a solid wall is sufficiently…
Aging in complex systems is studied via the sandpile model. Relaxation of avalanches in sandpiles is observed to depend on the time elapsed since the begining of the relaxation. Levy behavior is observed in the distribution of…
We measure how strong, localized contact adhesion between grains affects the maximum static critical angle, theta_c, of a dry sand pile. By mixing dimer grains, each consisting of two spheres that have been rigidly bonded together, with…
This paper is about cubic sand grains moving around on nicely packed columns in one dimension (the physical sand pile is two dimensional, but the support of sand columns is one dimensional). The Kadanoff Sand Pile Model is a discrete…
We study the two-dimensional Abelian Sandpile Model on a square lattice of linear size L. We introduce the notion of avalanche's fine structure and compare the behavior of avalanches and waves of toppling. We show that according to the…
An experimental study of a granular surface submitted to a circular fluid motion is presented. The appearance of an instability along the sand-water interface is observed beyond a critical radius $r_c$. This creates ripples with a spiral…
Failure in disordered solids is accompanied by intermittent fluctuations extending over a broad range of scales. The implied scaling has been previously associated with either spinodal or critical points. We use an analytically transparent…
Wettability is a pore-scale property that has an important impact on capillarity, residual trapping, and hysteresis in porous media systems. In many applications, the wettability of the rock surface is assumed to be constant in time and…
We use a phenomenological field theory, reflecting the symmetries and conservation laws of sandpiles, to compare the driven dissipative sandpile, widely studied in the context of self-organized criticality, with the corresponding…
In multicomponent systems with strong local interaction one can encounter some phenomena absent in the standard systems of statistical physics and other multicomponent systems. Namely, a system with $N$ components in the bounded volume of…
In two-dimensional rotating drum experiments, we find two separate influences of the packing fraction of a granular heap on its stability. For a fixed grain shape, the stability increases with packing fraction. However, in determining the…