Publications related to Criticality in the Approach to Failure in Amorphous Solids

Eight-vertex criticality in the interacting Kitaev chain

We show that including pairing and repulsion into the description of one-dimensional spinless fermions, as in the domain wall theory of commensurate melting or the interacting Kitaev chain, leads, for strong enough repulsion, to a line of critical points i ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2023

Fractal Analysis of Four Xerogels Based on TEGylated Phenothiazine and Chitosan

Maria-Alexandra Paun

The present article describes novel massive materials (in the solid phase) based on TEGylated phenothiazine and chitosan that possess great capability to recover mercury ions from constituent aqueous solutions. These were produced by chitosan hydrogelation ...

MDPI2023

Atomic-level structure determination of amorphous molecular solids by NMR

Manuel Cordova, Arthur César Pinon, David Lyndon Emsley, Pinelopi Moutzouri

Structure determination of amorphous materials remains challenging, owing to the disorder inherent to these materials. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) powder crystallography is a powerful method to determine the structure of molecular solids, but disorder ...

Nature Portfolio2023

NMR Crystallography in the Big Data Era: New Methods and Applications Powered by Machine Learning

Manuel Cordova

Structure determination of materials is key to understanding their physical properties. While single-crystal X-ray diffraction is the gold standard for structures displaying long-range order, many materials of interest are polycrystalline and/or disordered ...

EPFL2023

Automatic and high-precision microseismic monitoring of progressive failure prior, during, and after tunnel excavation

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Christophe Nussbaum, Seyyedmaalek Momeni

Acoustic emission (AE) monitoring is commonly used to inspect the health of a structure continuously. During fracture processes elastic waves of AE are created and emitted, and sensors can capture these waves. The acquired signals can be processed to track ...

2023

Modeling the mechanics and rheology of porous and granular media: an elastoplastic continuum approach

Lars Kristoffer Uhlen Blatny

The complex mechanics of porous and granular media play a significant role in various industrial processes and natural phenomena. As an example, understanding the mechanics of how failure occurs, localizes and propagates in porous brittle solids under vari ...

EPFL2023

Atomic scale volume and grain boundary diffusion elucidated by in situ STEM

Johann Michler, Amit Sharma, Laszlo Pethö, Xavier Maeder

Diffusion is one of the most important phenomena studied in science ranging from physics to biology and, in abstract form, even in social sciences. In the field of materials science, diffusion in crystalline solids is of particular interest as it plays a p ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Single-Well Pore Pressure Preconditioning for Enhanced Geothermal System Stimulation

Marie Estelle Solange Violay, Barnaby Padraig Fryer, Mathias Alexandre David Lebihain

The stress state is an important parameter in terms of both earthquake nucleation and rupture. Here, a new stimulation technique is proposed for Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGSs), which have previously been burdened with a number of high-profile incidence ...

2023

Scaling Description of Creep Flow in Amorphous Solids

Marko Popovic, Matthieu Wyart, Wencheng Ji, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus

Amorphous solids such as coffee foam, toothpaste, or mayonnaise display a transient creep flow when a stress E is suddenly imposed. The associated strain rate is commonly found to decay in time as gamma_ -t-nu, followed either by arrest or by a sudden flui ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2022

Thermal critical points from competing singlet formations in fully frustrated bilayer antiferromagnets

Frédéric Mila, Antoine Yves Dimitri Fache

We examine the ground-state phase diagram and thermal phase transitions in a plaquettized fully frustrated bilayer spin-1/2 Heisenberg model. Based on a combined analysis from sign-problem free quantum Monte Carlo simulations, perturbation theory, and free ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2022

Investigation of the effect of mineral dissolution on the geomechanical behaviour of geomaterials

Taeheon Kim

Geotechnical engineering scenarios engaged in internal erosion or mineral dissolution were found worldwide, from CO2 sequestration projects to internal erosion of earth dams. Materials subjected to loss of solid phase from their internal fabric vary from s ...

EPFL2022

From coating flow patterns to porous body wake dynamics via multiscale models

Pier Giuseppe Ledda

Multiscale phenomena are involved in countless problems in fluid mechanics. Coating flows are known to exhibit a broad variety of patterns, such as wine tears in a glass and dripping of fresh paint applied on a wall. Coating flows are typically modeled und ...

EPFL2022

Local excitations in amorphous solids

Wencheng Ji

Amorphous solids are structurally disordered. They are very common and include glasses, colloids, and granular materials, but are far less understood than crystalline solids. Key aspects of these materials are controlled by the presence of excitations in w ...

EPFL2021

Thermally activated flow in models of amorphous solids

Marko Popovic, Matthieu Wyart, Wencheng Ji, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus

Amorphous solids yield at a critical value Sigma(c) of the imposed stress Sigma through a dynamical phase transition. While sharp in athermal systems, the presence of thermal fluctuations leads to the rounding of the transition and thermally activated flow ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2021

Inferring the flow properties of epithelial tissues from their geometry

Marko Popovic, Valentin Camille Druelle, Matthieu Wyart

Amorphous materials exhibit complex material properties with strongly nonlinear behaviors. Below a yield stress they behave as plastic solids, while they start to yield above a critical stress sigma(c). A key quantity controlling plasticity which is, howev ...

2021

A direct link between active matter and sheared granular systems

Elisabeth Agoritsas

The similarity in mechanical properties of dense active matter and sheared amorphous solids has been noted in recent years without a rigorous examination of the underlying mechanism. We develop a mean-field model that predicts that their critical behavior— ...

2021

Quantum vibronic effects on the electronic properties of solid and molecular carbon

François Gygi, Michele Ceriotti, Han Yang

We study the effect of quantum vibronic coupling on the electronic properties of carbon allotropes, including molecules and solids, by combining path integral first principles molecular dynamics (FPMD) with a colored noise thermostat. In addition to avoidi ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2021

Is a Single Conformer Sufficient to Describe the Reorganization Energy of Amorphous Organic Transport Materials?

Anne-Clémence Corminboeuf, Kun-Han Lin, Iwona Swiderska, Hélène Wu, Raimon Fabregat I De Aguilar-Amat, Jacob Terence Blaskovits

The reorganization energy (lambda), which quantifies the structural rearrangement of a molecule when accommodating a charge, is a key parameter in the evaluation of charge mobility in molecular solids. However, it is unclear how lambda is influenced by con ...

AMER CHEMICAL SOC2021

Synthesis, structural and magnetic characterization of thin films of the chiral magnets CoZnMn and FeGe

Anna Kúkol'ová

Skyrmions are topologically protected nanometer-sized magnetic vortices that have sparked interest for future spintronics applications aiming at high-density, high-speed and low-power consuming magnetic memory devices. One type of skyrmions appears in non- ...

EPFL2021

A quantum magnetic analogue to the critical point of water

Mohamed Zayed, Ludger Weber, Frédéric Mila, Bruce Normand, Henrik Moodysson Rønnow, Julio Antonio Larrea Jiménez, Kazimierz Conder, Ellen Fogh, Christian Rüegg

At the liquid-gas phase transition in water, the density has a discontinuity at atmospheric pressure; however, the line of these first-order transitions defined by increasing the applied pressure terminates at the critical point(1), a concept ubiquitous in ...

2021