Related papers: On Phase Transition and Self-Organized Critical St…
We present the results of an experimental study of patterned segregation in a horizontally shaken shallow layer of a binary mixture of dry particles. An order parameter for the segregated structures is defined and the effect of the…
A granular system confined in a quasi two-dimensional box that is vertically vibrated can transit to an absorbing state in which all particles bounce vertically in phase with the box, with no horizontal motion. In principle, this state can…
Spontaneous stratification of granular mixtures has been reported by Makse et al. [Nature 386, 379 (1997)] when a mixture of grains differing in size and shape is poured in a quasi-two-dimensional heap. We study this phenomenon using two…
We show that the yielding transition in granular media displays second-order critical-point scaling behavior. We carry out discrete element simulations in the low inertial number limit for frictionless, purely repulsive spherical grains…
Particulate matter, such as foams, emulsions, and granular materials, attain rigidity in a dense regime: the rigid phase can yield when a threshold force is applied. The rigidity transition in particulate matter exhibits {\it bona fide}…
Experimental results for covalent glasses have highlighted the existence of a new self-organized phase due to the tendency of glass networks to minimize internal stress. Recently, we have shown that an equilibrated self-organized…
We report the experimental observation of a square crystalline phase in a vibrated binary mixture of spherical grains. This structure spontaneously forms from a disordered state, consistently with predictions obtained in an equilibrium…
Granular materials, composed of discrete solid grains, can be modeled as simple mechanical systems. However, these materials can undergo spontaneous slow deformation, or creep, even under small forces and while in apparent mechanical…
Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…
Recent studies of two-dimensional poly-disperse disc systems revealed a coordinated self-organisation of cell stresses and shapes, with certain distributions collapsing onto a master form for many processes, size distributions, friction…
Soft-granular media, such as dense emulsions, foams or tissues, exhibit either fluid- or solid-like properties depending on the applied external stresses. Whereas bulk rheology of such materials has been thoroughly investigated, the…
The self-organized critical state is characterized by a power law distribution of cluster sizes and other properties. However experiments with sand and rice piles reveal distributions of avalanche sizes which are not power law distributed.…
We describe the contact network of granular packings by a frustrated lattice gas that contains steric frustration as essential ingredient. Two transitions are identified, a spin glass transition at the onset of Reynolds dilatancy and at…
The impacts of granular jets for both frictional and frictionless grains in two dimensions are numerically investigated. A dense flow with a dead zone emerges during the impact. From our two-dimensional simulation, we evaluate the equations…
Many clays, soils, biological tissues, foods, and coatings are shrinkable, granular materials: they are composed of packed, hydrated grains that shrink when dried. In many cases, these packings crack during drying, critically hindering…
We study the emergence of critical dynamics in the steady shear rheology of fluidized soft glassy materials. Within a mesoscale elasto-plastic model accounting for a shear band instability, we show how an additional noise can induce a…
Granular creep is the slow, sub-yield movement of constituents in a granular packing due to the disordered nature of its grain-scale interactions. Despite the ubiquity of creep in disordered materials, it is still not understood how to best…
A significant amount of attention was dedicated in recent years to the phenomenon of jamming of athermal amorphous solids by increasing the volume fraction of the microscopic constituents. At a critical value of the volume fraction,…
Randomly packing spheres of equal size into a container consistently results in a static configuration with a density of ~64%. The ubiquity of random close packing (RCP) rather than the optimal crystalline array at 74% begs the question of…
A two-dimensional dense fluid of frictional grains is shown to exhibit time-chaotic, spatially heterogeneous flow in a range of stress values, $\sigma$, chosen in the unstable region of s-shaped flow curves. Stress controlled simulations…