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...