Ponente: Carl P. Goodrich
Procedencia: Department of Physics and Astronomy

Resumen:

For more than a century, physicists have described real solids in
terms of perturbations about perfect crystalline order. Such an
approach takes us only so far: a glass, another ubiquitous form of
rigid matter, cannot be described in any meaningful sense as a
defected crystal. Is there an opposite extreme to a crystal—a solid
with complete disorder—that forms an alternative starting point for
understanding real materials? I will argue that packings of
frictionless soft spheres at the so-called "jamming transition"
constitutes such an extreme limit. The appeal of jamming is that it is
governed by a critical point, complete with power-law scaling and
diverging length scales. Despite being inherently out of equilibrium,
I will show that the jamming transition can be described by a
Widom-like scaling theory, implying that jamming exhibits an emergent
scale invariance and paving the way for the development of a
renormalization-group theory.

viernes 13 hr
Auditorio del IF