2011-04-14
11:00 at HCI J 574

Elasticity, transport and flow near the jamming threshold

Matthieu Wyart

Department of Physics - New York University, USA

The elasticity, the transport properties and the rheology of amorphous materials such as grains, colloids or molecular glasses is complicated by the presence of disorder. In recent years it has been realized that for simple systems, such as frictionless particles, the length scale at which disorder has strong effects becomes much larger than the particle size, and in fact diverges near the jamming transition delimiting the liquid and the solid phase. This has led to new concepts to describe amorphous materials and sphere packings that will be reviewed, together with open questions.