We report an experiment on a granular packing: a box filled with glass beads is tilted very slowly up to the maximum angle of stability where a big avalanche is produced. During the build-up period many rearrangements occur on the free surface of the packing. Digital imaging was used to study...

In this work we employ event-driven particle dynamics simulations for a system of spherical insulating grains interacting with an external electric field. This system resembles the electrostatic particle separation present on some industrial processes. Here, the particles collide inelastically...

The elastic properties of granular materials can be enormously nonlinear as compared with the properties of non-porous materials. Experiments on isotropic compression of a granular assembly of spheres show that the shear μ, and bulk k, moduli vary with the confining pressure faster than the 1/3...

We briefly describe how mean-field glass models can be extended to the case where the bath and friction are non-thermal. Solving their dynamics, one discovers a temperature with a thermodynamic meaning associated with the slow rearrangements, even though there is no thermodynamic temperature at...

We discuss the application of synchrotron X-ray microtomography (XMT) to granular matter, foams, crumpled membranes, and paper. XMT provides rapid, high-resolution, fully three-dimensional characterization of each of these classes of material. In some cases, subsequent three-dimensional image...

The initiation and steady-state dynamics of granular shear flow are investigated experimentally in a Couette geometry with independently moveable outer and inner cylinders. The motion of particles on the top surface is analyzed using fast imaging. During steady state rotation of both cylinders...

The contact network of a frictionless polydisperse granular packing is isostatic in the limit of low applied pressure. It is argued here that, on disordered isostatic networks, displacement–displacement and stress–stress static Green functions are described by random multiplicative processes...

We discuss two athermal types of dynamics suitable for spin-models designed to model repeated tapping of a granular assembly. These dynamics are applied to a range of models characterized by a 3-spin Hamiltonian aiming to capture the geometric frustration in packings of granular matter.

A cell theory for glassforming liquids, amorphous solids and granular packings, is developed by combining geometrical properties of local packings with the ideas of inherent structures and free volume theory. We show that for hard-spheres the present theory reproduces well the equation of state,...

We report an experiment where a torsion oscillator is forced to penetrate a granular system over a small distance as, and the angular deflection is continuously detected. From angular deflections time series we deduce the granular noise and obtain insights on the grain-level mechanisms. In...