Related papers: Granular matter instability: A structural rigidity…
The stability of a complex system generally decreases with increasing system size and interconnectivity, a counterintuitive result of widespread importance across the physical, life, and social sciences. Despite recent interest in the…
We describe the dynamics of a stream of equally spaced macroscopic particles in orbit around a central body (e.g. a planet or star). A co-orbital configuration of small bodies may be subject to gravitational instability, which takes the…
We derive exact results for stress correlations in near-crystalline systems in two and three dimensions. We study energy minimized configurations of particles interacting through Harmonic as well as Lennard-Jones potentials, for varying…
We consider a nearly-elastic model system with one degree of freedom. In each collision with the "wall", the system can either lose or gain a small amount of energy due to stochastic perturbation. The weak limit of the corresponding slow…
Dry granular materials consist of a vast ensemble of discrete solid particles, interacting through complex frictional forces at the contact points. The particles are so large that these systems are believed to be completely athermal. Here,…
We discuss the stability of galactic disks in which the energy of interstellar clouds is gained in encounters with expanding supernova remnants and lost in inelastic collisions. Energy gain and loss processes introduce a phase difference…
Volume alteration in solid materials is a common cause of material failure. Here we investigate the crack formation in thin elastic layers attached to a substrate. We show that small variations in the volume contraction and substrate…
We investigate the onset of irreversibility in a dense granular medium subjected to cyclic shear in a split-bottom geometry. To probe the micro and mesoscale we image bead trajectories in 3D throughout a series of shear strain oscillations.…
Here we numerically study a model of excitable media, namely, a network with occasionally quiet nodes and connection weights that vary with activity on a short-time scale. Even in the absence of stimuli, this exhibits unstable dynamics,…
We probe the onset and effect of contact changes in soft harmonic particle packings which are sheared quasistatically. We find that the first contact changes are the creation or breaking of contacts on a single particle. We characterize the…
Mechanical deformation of amorphous solids can be described as consisting of an elastic part in which the stress increases linearly with strain, up to a yield point at which the solid either fractures or starts deforming plastically. It is…
Vertically vibrated rod-shaped granular materials confined to quasi-2D containers self organize into distinct patterns. We find, consistent with theory and simulation, a density dependent isotropic-nematic transition. Along the walls, rods…
We investigate the down-hill creep of a layer of granular material on a slope caused by an oscillatory variation of the size of the particles. The material is modeled as an athermal two dimensional polydisperse system of soft disks under…
We systematically investigate the incremental response of various equilibrium states of dense 2D model granular materials, along the biaxial compression path (\sigma 11 < \sigma 22, \sigma 12 = 0). Stress increments are applied in arbitrary…
We numerically investigate the properties of speckle patterns formed by nonlinear point scatterers. We show that, in the weak localization regime, dynamical instability appears, eventually leading to chaotic behavior of the system.…
We derive stability conditions of Asymmetric Nuclear Matter ($ANM$) and discuss the relation to mechanical and chemical instabilities of general two-component systems. We show that the chemical instability may appear as an instability of…
We study the structural properties of two-dimensional granular packings prepared by random deposition from a source line. We consider a class of random ballistic deposition models based on single-particle relaxation rules controlled by a…
A mechanism is proposed for initial stage of instability development that can induce the fragmentation of nuclear matter, arising as a result of collisions of non-relativistic heavy nuclei. Collision of heavy nuclei is simulated as a…
We study computationally the creep and yielding of athermal gels and fibre network materials under a constant imposed shear stress, within a minimal model of interconnected filaments with central forces in $d=2$ spatial dimensions. Each…
We study the tolerance to congestion failures in communication networks with scale-free topology. The traffic load carried by each damaged element in the network must be partly or totally redistributed among the remaining elements.…