The stress ensemble for granular packings

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Silke Henkes, University of Aberdeen
• Friday 22 May 2015, 13:00-14:00
• Todd Hamied Room, Dept. of Chemistry.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Lucy Colwell.

Granular packings are disordered, athermal, driven materials that defy description with conventional statistical mechanics. In this talk, I will introduce the stress ensemble, based on conservation laws for packings in mechanical equilibrium. Adapting the fundamental derivation of the thermal canonical ensemble, we arrive at a description with a granular density of states, closely linked to the entropy, and a tensorial inverse temperature equivalent. The idea of the ensemble has been tested numerically in frictionless packings, and experimentally in frictional packings, including an adaptation of the SGR formalism. I will briefly sketch these.

The complex interactions between stress and contact degrees of freedom allow only limited direct calculations. I will present the results of a field theory based on the Airy stress function (2 dimensional), and a full mean field description.

This talk is part of the Extra Theoretical Chemistry Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Department of Chemistry
• Featured lists
• Lennard-Jones Centre external
• School of Physical Sciences
• Todd Hamied Room, Dept. of Chemistry

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.