2,852 research outputs found
Comment on "Constant stress and pressure rheology of colloidal suspensions"
This is a comment on the recent letter by Wang and Brady on "Constant stress
and pressure rheology of colloidal suspensions", Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 158301
(2015).Comment: 1 page; under review -> v2: publishe
Can the jamming transition be described using equilibrium statistical mechanics?
When materials such as foams or emulsions are compressed, they display solid
behaviour above the so-called `jamming' transition. Because compression is done
out-of-equilibrium in the absence of thermal fluctuations, jamming appears as a
new kind of a nonequilibrium phase transition. In this proceeding paper, we
suggest that tools from equilibrium statistical mechanics can in fact be used
to describe many specific features of the jamming transition. Our strategy is
to introduce thermal fluctuations and use statistical mechanics to describe the
complex phase behaviour of systems of soft repulsive particles, before sending
temperature to zero at the end of the calculation. We show that currently
available implementations of standard tools such as integral equations,
mode-coupling theory, or replica calculations all break down at low temperature
and large density, but we suggest that new analytical schemes can be developed
to provide a fully microscopic, quantitative description of the jamming
transition.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figs. Talk presented at Statphys24 (July 2010, Cairns,
Australia
Prediction of transits of solar system objects in Kepler/K2 images: An extension of the Virtual Observatory service SkyBoT
All the fields of the extended space mission Kepler/K2 are located within the
ecliptic. Many solar system objects thus cross the K2 stellar masks on a
regular basis. We aim at providing to the entire community a simple tool to
search and identify solar system objects serendipitously observed by Kepler.
The SkyBoT service hosted at IMCCE provides a Virtual Observatory (VO)
compliant cone-search that lists all solar system objects present within a
field of view at a given epoch. To generate such a list in a timely manner,
ephemerides are pre-computed, updated weekly, and stored in a relational
database to ensure a fast access. The SkyBoT Web service can now be used with
Kepler. Solar system objects within a small (few arcminutes) field of view are
identified and listed in less than 10 sec. Generating object data for the
entire K2 field of view (14{\deg}) takes about a minute. This extension of the
SkyBot service opens new possibilities with respect to mining K2 data for solar
system science, as well as removing solar system objects from stellar
photometric time-series
Compressing nearly hard sphere fluids increases glass fragility
We use molecular dynamics to investigate the glass transition occurring at
large volume fraction, phi, and low temperature, T, in assemblies of soft
repulsive particles. We find that equilibrium dynamics in the (phi, T) plane
obey a form of dynamic scaling in the proximity of a critical point at T=0 and
phi=phi_0, which should correspond to the ideal glass transition of hard
spheres. This glass point, `point G', is distinct from athermal jamming
thresholds. A remarkable consequence of scaling behaviour is that the dynamics
at fixed phi passes smoothly from that of a strong glass to that of a very
fragile glass as phi increases beyond phi_0. Correlations between fragility and
various physical properties are explored.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures; Version accepted at Europhys. Let
The role of attractive forces in viscous liquids
We present evidence from computer simulation that the slowdown of relaxation
of a standard Lennard-Jones glass-forming liquid and that of its reduction to a
model with truncated pair potentials without attractive tails is quantitatively
and qualitatively different in the viscous regime. The pair structure of the
two models is however very similar. This finding, which appears to contradict
the common view that the physics of dense liquids is dominated by the steep
repulsive forces between atoms, is characterized in detail, and its
consequences are explored. Beyond the role of attractive forces themselves, a
key aspect in explaining the differences in the dynamical behavior of the two
models is the truncation of the interaction potentials beyond a cutoff at
typical interatomic distance. This leads us to question the ability of the
jamming scenario to describe the physics of glass-forming liquids and polymers.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figure
A Molecular Hydrodynamic Theory of Supercooled Liquids and Colloidal Suspensions under Shear
We extend the conventional mode-coupling theory of supercooled liquids to
systems under stationary shear flow. Starting from generalized fluctuating
hydrodynamics, a nonlinear equation for the intermediate scattering function is
constructed. We evaluate the solution numerically for a model of a two
dimensional colloidal suspension and find that the structural relaxation time
decreases as with an exponent , where
is the shear rate. The results are in qualitative agreement with
recent molecular dynamics simulations. We discuss the physical implications of
the results.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur
Revisiting the slow dynamics of a silica melt using Monte Carlo simulations
We implement a standard Monte Carlo algorithm to study the slow, equilibrium
dynamics of a silica melt in a wide temperature regime, from 6100 K down to
2750 K. We find that the average dynamical behaviour of the system is in
quantitative agreement with results obtained from molecular dynamics
simulations, at least in the long-time regime corresponding to the
alpha-relaxation. By contrast, the strong thermal vibrations related to the
Boson peak present at short times in molecular dynamics are efficiently
suppressed by the Monte Carlo algorithm. This allows us to reconsider silica
dynamics in the context of mode-coupling theory, because several shortcomings
of the theory were previously attributed to thermal vibrations. A mode-coupling
theory analysis of our data is qualitatively correct, but quantitative tests of
the theory fail, raising doubts about the very existence of an avoided
singularity in this system. We discuss the emergence of dynamic heterogeneity
and report detailed measurements of a decoupling between translational
diffusion and structural relaxation, and of a growing four-point dynamic
susceptibility. Dynamic heterogeneity appears to be less pronounced than in
more fragile glass-forming models, but not of a qualitatively different nature.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures; to be published in Phys. Rev.
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