Related papers: Random solids and random solidification: What can …
Systems undergoing an equilibrium phase transition from a liquid state to an amorphous solid state exhibit certain universal characteristics. Chief among these are the fraction of particles that are randomly localized and the scaling…
Amorphous solids, or glasses, are distinguished from crystalline solids by their lack of long-range structural order. At the level of two-body structural correlations, glassformers show no qualitative change upon vitrifying from a…
Despite the use of glasses for thousands of years, the nature of the glass transition is still mysterious. On approaching the glass transition, the growth of dynamic heterogeneity has long been thought to play a key role in explaining the…
As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…
We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…
Using positional data from video-microscopy of a two-dimensional colloidal system and from simulations of hard discs we determine the wave-vector-dependent normal mode spring constants in the supercooled fluid and glassy state,…
When liquids are cooled sufficiently rapidly below their melting temperature, they may bypass crystalization and, instead, enter a long-lived metastable supercooled state that has long been the focus of intense research. Although they…
Mutual information between local stress and local non-affine deformation is proposed as a collective field variable quantifying the {\em local softness} of soft materials. The liquid-solid transition in a simple liquid is considered as a…
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…
The most puzzling aspect of the glass transition observed in laboratory is an apparent decoupling of dynamics from structure. In this paper we recount the implication of various theories of glass transition for the static correlation length…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…
We study slow dynamics of particles moving in a matrix of immobile obstacles using molecular dynamics simulations. The glass transition point decreases drastically as the obstacle density increases. At higher obstacle densities, the…
Recent ideas based on the properties of assemblies of frictionless particles in mechanical equilibrium provide a perspective of amorphous systems different from that offered by the traditional approach originating in liquid theory. The…
The dynamical glass transition is typically taken to be the temperature at which a glassy liquid is no longer able to equilibrate on experimental timescales. Consequently, the physical properties of these systems just above or below the…
We review the depinning and nonequilibrium phases of collectively interacting particle systems driven over random or periodic substrates. This type of system is relevant to vortices in type-II superconductors, sliding charge density waves,…
This paper summarizes a talk presented at the April NATO ASI on Spatiotemporal Chaos in Complex Fluids, in Santa Fe, NM. The paper gives reasons that make complex fluids good material systems for conducting experiments on pattern formation…
It is difficult to derive the solid--fluid transition from microscopic models. We introduce particle systems whose potentials do not decay with distance and calculate their partition function exactly using a method similar to that for…
We use dynamic light scattering and computer simulations to study equilibrium dynamics and dynamic heterogeneity in concentrated suspensions of colloidal hard spheres. Our study covers an unprecedented density range and spans seven decades…
When subjected to large amplitude oscillatory shear stress, aqueous Laponite suspensions show an abrupt solidification transition after a long delay time tc. We measure the dependence of tc on stress amplitude, frequency, and on the…
Particle suspensions, present in many natural and industrial settings, typically contain aggregates or other microstructures that can complicate macroscopic flow behaviors and damage processing equipment. Recent work found that applying…