No Arabic abstract
We investigate the impact induced damage and fracture of a bar shaped specimen of heterogeneous materials focusing on how the system approaches perforation as the impact energy is gradually increased. A simple model is constructed which represents the bar as two rigid blocks coupled by a breakable interface with disordered local strength. The bar is clamped at the two ends and the fracture process is initiated by an impactor hitting the bar in the middle. Our calculations revealed that depending on the imparted energy, the system has two phases: at low impact energies the bar suffers damage but keeps its integrity, while at sufficiently high energies, complete perforation occurs. We demonstrate that the transition from damage to perforation occurs analogous to continuous phase transitions. Approaching the critical point from below, the intact fraction of the interface goes to zero, while the deformation rate of the bar diverges according to power laws as function of the distance from the critical energy. As the degree of disorder increases, further from the transition point the critical exponents agree with their zero disorder counterparts, however, close to the critical point a crossover occurs to a higher exponent.
A fitting scheme is proposed to obtain effective potentials from Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics (CPMD) simulations. It is used to parameterize a new pair potential for silica. MD simulations with this new potential are done to determine structural and dynamic properties and to compare these properties to those obtained from CPMD and a MD simulation using the so-called BKS potential. The new potential reproduces accurately the liquid structure generated by the CPMD trajectories, the experimental activation energies for the self-diffusion constants and the experimental density of amorphous silica. Also lattice parameters and elastic constants of alpha-quartz are well-reproduced, showing the transferability of the new potential.
The gigantic reduction of the electric resistivity under the applied magnetic field, CMR effect, is now widely accepted to appear in the vicinity of the insulator to metal transition of the perovskite manganites. Recently, we have discovered the first order transition from ferromagnetic metal to insulator in $rm La_{0.88}Sr_{0.12}MnO_3$ of the CMR manganite. This phase transition induces the tremendous increase of the resistivity under the external magnetic field just near above the phase transition temperature. We report here fairly detailed results from the systematic experiments including neutron and synchrotron X-ray scattering studies.
Statistical models are essential to get a better understanding of the role of disorder in brittle disordered solids. Fiber bundle models play a special role as a paradigm, with a very good balance of simplicity and non-trivial effects. We introduce here a variant of the fiber bundle model where the load is transferred among the fibers through a very compliant membrane. This Soft Membrane fiber bundle mode reduces to the classical Local Load Sharing fiber bundle model in 1D. Highlighting the continuum limit of the model allows to compute an equivalent toughness for the fiber bundle and hence discuss nucleation of a critical defect. The computation of the toughness allows for drawing a simple connection with crack front propagation (depinning) models.
We study the effect of strong disorder on topology and entanglement in quench dynamics. Although disorder-induced topological phases have been well studied in equilibrium, the disorder-induced topology in quench dynamics has not been explored. In this work, we predict a disorder-induced topology of post-quench states characterized by the quantized dynamical Chern number and the crossings in the entanglement spectrum in $(1+1)$ dimensions. The dynamical Chern number undergoes transitions from zero to unity, and back to zero when increasing the disorder strength. The boundaries between different dynamical Chern numbers are determined by delocalized critical points in the post-quench Hamiltonian with the strong disorder. An experimental realization in quantum walks is discussed.
We investigate the spin-glass transition in the strongly frustrated well-known compound $Fe_2TiO_5$. A remarkable feature of this transition, widely discussed in the literature, is its anisotropic properties: the transition manifests itself in the magnetic susceptibly only along one axis, despite $Fe^{3+}$ $d^5$ spins having no orbital component. We demonstrate, using neutron scattering, that below the transition temperature $T_g = 55 K$, $Fe_2TiO_5$ develops nanoscale surfboard shaped antiferromagnetic regions in which the $Fe^{3+}$ spins are aligned perpendicular to the axis which exhibits freezing. We show that the glass transition may result from the freezing of transverse fluctuations of the magnetization of these regions and we develop a mean-field replica theory of such a transition, revealing a type of magnetic van der Waals effect.