Michelle Przedborski

Localizing energy in granular materials

A device for absorbing and storing short duration impulses in an initially uncompressed one-dimensional granular chain is presented. Simply stated, short regions of sufficiently soft grains are embedded in a hard granular chain. These grains exhibit long-lived standing waves of predictable frequencies regardless of the timing of the arrival of solitary waves from the larger matrix. We explore the origins, symmetry, and energy content of the soft region and its intrinsic modes.

Fluctuations in Hertz chains at equilibrium

We examine the long-term behavior of nonintegrable, energy-conserved, one-dimensional systems of macroscopic grains interacting via a contact-only generalized Hertz potential and held between stationary walls. Such systems can be set up to have no phononic background excitation and represent examples of a sonic vacuum. Existing dynamical studies showed the absence of energy equipartitioning in such systems, hence their long-term dynamics was described as quasiequilibrium. Here we show that these systems do in fact reach thermal equilibrium at sufficiently long times, as indicated by the calculated heat capacity. As a by-product, we show how fluctuations of system quantities, and thus the distribution functions, are influenced by the Hertz potential. In particular, the variance of the systems kinetic energy probability density function is reduced by a factor related to the contact potential.

Traveling waves and conservation laws for highly nonlinear wave equations modeling Hertz chains

A highly nonlinear, fourth-order wave equation that models the continuum theory of long wavelength pulses in weakly compressed, homogeneous, discrete chains with a general power-law contact interaction is studied. For this wave equation, all solitary wave solutions and all nonlinear periodic wave solutions, along with all conservation laws, are derived. The solutions are explicitly parameterized in terms of the asymptotic value of the wave amplitude in the case of solitary waves and the peak of the wave amplitude in the case of nonlinear periodic waves. All cases in which the solution expressions can be stated in an explicit analytic form using elementary functions are worked out. In these cases, explicit expressions for the total energy and total momentum for all solutions are obtained as well. The derivation of the solutions uses the conservation laws combined with an energy analysis argument to reduce the wave equation directly to a separable first-order differential equation that determines the wave a...

The absence of phase transition for the classical XY-model on Sierpiński pyramid with fractal dimension D=2

For the spin models with continuous symmetry on regular lattices and finite range of interactions, the lower critical dimension is d = 2. In two dimensions the classical XY-model displays Berezinskii–Kosterlitz–Thouless (BKT) transition associated with unbinding of topological defects (vortices and antivortices). We perform a Monte Carlo study of the classical XY-model on Sierpiński pyramids (SPs) whose fractal dimension is D  =  log 4/log 2 = 2 and the average coordination number per site is ≈ 7. The specific heat does not depend on the system size which indicates the absence of a long-range order. From the dependence of the helicity modulus on the cluster size and on boundary conditions, we draw a conclusion that in the thermodynamic limit there is no BKT transition at any finite temperature. This conclusion is also supported by our results for linear magnetic susceptibility. The lack of finite temperature phase transition is presumably caused by the finite order of ramification of SP.

The equilibrium phase in heterogeneous Hertzian chains

We examine the long-term behaviour of non-integrable, energy-conserved, 1D systems of macroscopic grains interacting via a contact-only generalized Hertz potential and held between stationary walls. We previously showed that in homogeneous configurations of such systems, energy is equipartitioned at sufficiently long times, thus these systems ultimately reach thermal equilibrium. Here we expand on our previous work to show that heterogeneous configurations of grains also reach thermal equilibrium at sufficiently long times, as indicated by the calculated heat capacity. We investigate the transition to equilibrium in detail and introduce correlation functions that indicate the onset of the transition.

Long-term behavior of Hertzian chains between fixed walls is really equilibrium

We examine the long-term behavior of nonintegrable, energy-conserved, 1D systems of macroscopic grains interacting via a contact-only generalized Hertz potential and held between stationary walls. ...