Lucasian Professorship Inaugural Lecture - Two Theories of Jamming Transitions

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

• Professor Mike Cates
• Wednesday 04 November 2015, 17:00-18:00
• MR2, Centre for Mathematical Sciences.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact June Rix.

If drivers on a crowded road try to move slowly they will succeed, but if they try to move faster the result is a stationary traffic jam. Related jamming transitions arise in various other contexts and I will describe theories for two such cases. The first concerns a model of self-propelled repulsive particles, which is relevant to swimming microbes and their synthetic analogues, but could also describe dodgems at a funfair. Here, jamming causes phase separation into dense and dilute regions—an outcome that would, without self-propulsion, require attractions between the particles. The second jamming transition arises on shearing a dense suspension of hard spheres: a free-flowing fluid suddenly solidifies when pushed too hard. This is disruptive in industrial contexts, and can be appreciated in the kitchen by adding a little water to corn-starch or custard powder. I will show how a smooth stress dependence of the mean friction at individual particle contacts leads inevitably to a discontinuity in macroscopic behaviour.

This talk is part of the Faculty of Mathematics Lectures series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All CMS events
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• CMS Events
• DAMTP info aggregator
• Faculty of Mathematics Lectures
• Guy Emerson's list
• Interested Talks
• MR2, Centre for Mathematical Sciences
• School of Physical Sciences
• bld31

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.