Dense amorphous materials which exhibits a solid-like behaviour, or ‘structural glasses’, are ubiquitous around us. They span a very wide range of experimental systems in soft matter, condensed matter, or biophysics, such as emulsions, foams, biological tissues, metallic glasses, etc. From a material sciences perspective, their structural disorder can be tuned depending on their initial preparation and the subsequent driving history. This has key implications for the mechanical and transport properties of such materials, quite distinct compared to crystalline materials, and paves the way to engineer specific disorder-induced properties. Theoretical descriptions of dense amorphous materials remain challenging, though crucially needed for rationalising the wide range of observed dynamical features (and assessing their potential universality). One successful approach is based on coarsed-grained descriptions, with ad hoc effective ingredients. Another approach, which might seem more abstract at first, consists in playing with the spatial dimension. In this talk I will discuss which (exact) insights can be obtained from the infinite-dimensional limit, and why/how they can be informative for the low-dimensional space (2D, 3D) we actually live in.
You can download the slides here (PDF).
Please register in you want to join for pizza at this doodle.
Location: Stuckelberg, Ecole de Physique
Time: Friday 17 November 2023, 12:10 for pizza, 12:30 start discussion