EVENT DETAILS AND ABSTRACT

Title: Thermodynamics of Jammed Matter
Speaker: Herman Makse
Speaker Info: City College of the City University of New York
Brief Description:
Special Note: More current information may be available at Plan-it Purple
Abstract:

Jamming refers to a state which emerges when a many-body system is blocked in a static configuration far from equilibrium. The concept of jamming is emerging as a fundamental feature of many diverse systems such as granular materials, emulsions, colloidal suspensions, structural glasses and spin glasses. It has been postulated that the behavior of systems experiencing such a structural arrest can be described by a statistical ensemble at a fixed total volume such that all microscopic jammed states are equally probable and become accessible to one another (the ergodic hypothesis) by the application of tapping or shear, just as thermal systems explore their energy landscape through Brownian motion. Although the idea of a thermodynamic description of granular matter was recognized as attractive, it was not universally accepted because there is no known first principle justification of the statistical ensemble, such as there is for ordinary statistical mechanics of liquids or gases (Liouville's theorem). Here we combine micromechanical modeling, computational simulations and experimental characterization to explore this unifying thermodynamic framework. In particular we present recent results for jammed granular materials and compressed mulsionsystems which strongly support the thermodynamic approach.