The group welcomes postdoctoral researcher Mengfei He. Mengfei comes from the Nagel lab at the University of Chicago. Welcome, Mengfei!
Despite the ubiquity of memory formation in condensed matter, there is presently no overarching framework for classifying memory behaviors. This review article considers memory formation across a broad range of systems (memories in rocks, rubber, glasses, and amorphous solids; memories in magnetic systems; echo phenomena; shape memory; associative memory; etc.), with an eye towards developing unifying conceptual underpinnings for material memories. Such a study of memory formation provides a setting for exploring some of the most fascinating aspects of history-dependence, dynamics, and information storage in far-from-equilibrium systems.
We typically think of memory as the stuff stored in hard drives or our brains, but memory effects abound in a wide range of materials. Rubber and rocks can remember the largest load that was applied to them, glasses may remember a temperature where they were aged, and shape-memory alloys can recall a programmed shape. One approach to building a broader understanding of memory formation in matter is to construct and study simple models where memories may be written, stored, and retrieved. This article shows how a model of worn grass between park benches can produce a peculiar memory behavior that has been observed in the motion of electrons in a special kind of conductor, and in the flow of solid grains in viscous liquids. Continue reading “How much can a grassy path remember?”
REU student Jessica Stelzel has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She will be starting her PhD at Johns Hopkins University in the Fall, working to create regenerative biomaterials with Dr. Hai-Quan Mao. Congratulations, Jessica!
Many objects are wrapped in thin sheets to contain, protect, or conceal the contents, from foil-wrapped candy to high-altitude helium balloons to a liquid droplet sealed inside a polymer film. This review explores the mechanics and geometry of thin elastic wrappers, which are essential to a wide variety of applications in mechanical, chemical, and aerospace engineering, and have spurred basic questions in soft matter physics and mathematics. The manuscript will appear in Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics in March 2019; see the advance online edition here or the arXiv version here.
Suspensions appear in a wide range of industrial settings, and dispersing particles in a uniform manner throughout a fluid is an important challenge. We studied how shear can be used to control the spatial distribution of particles that are settling under gravity in a viscous liquid. We discovered that at sufficiently low sedimentation speeds, extremely homogeneous mixtures are automatically obtained, without any fine tuning of the driving. See the paper here.
Undergraduate Jordan Barrett has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Congratulations, Jordan!
Thin elastic sheets make surprisingly good wrappers for liquid droplets: surface tension will spontaneously pull an ultrathin sheet around a droplet, all while making efficient use of the sheet (see it in this short video clip by Science Magazine). The wrapper can be used for a variety of tasks: it provides a strong barrier for protecting the liquid cargo, it can deform the droplet into predictable shapes, and it provides a platform for adding a chemical pattern. But creating many such droplets requires a rapid and scalable process. A new technique uses droplet impact on a floating polymer film to achieve a tidy wrapping in a fraction of a second. The experiments were carried out by Deepak Kumar and Joseph Paulsen at UMass Amherst, and the results are published here.
A new Paulsen Lab YouTube channel features video clips of liquid droplets and thin elastic sheets. Current content is from recent work done at UMass Amherst and UChicago, plus an interview by the Syracuse University College of Arts & Sciences. More clips coming soon!
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