Non-Linearity and Breakdown in Soft Condensed Matter: Proceedings of a Workshop Held at Calcutta, India, 1 - 9 December 1993 (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)

There have been considerable advances in recent times in understanding many common material processes that are of practical importance, such as nonlinear response, fracture, breakdown, earthquakes, packing and granular flow. This has been mainly due to new applications of statistical physics, including percolation theory, fractal concepts and self-organized criticality. This collection of articles brings together research in those closely allied fields. It deals with problems in materials science involving random geometries and nonlinearity at a mesoscopic scale, and problems where randomness in time evolution is as crucial as the geometry itself. Introduction....Pages 1-4 Decompaction, fluidisation and segregation in a 2D sandpile....Pages 5-17 Granular flow: Some experimental results....Pages 18-27 Density waves in granular flow....Pages 28-39 Height fluctuations and pressure distribution in a model of random close packing of mono-size discs....Pages 40-46 Statics and dynamics of sandpiles: Some phenomenological ideas....Pages 47-53 Some physical properties of the Burridge-Knopoff model....Pages 54-77 Jerky flow, stick-slip in geological materials and earthquake models....Pages 78-106 Dynamics and structure of displacement fronts in two-dimensional porous media....Pages 107-123 Heterogeneous porous media: Fronts and noise....Pages 124-133 Pattern formation in particulate complex fluids: A guided tour....Pages 134-150 Solvable models of material breakdown....Pages 151-170 Fracture and other breakdown phenomena in disordered solids....Pages 171-185 Spring-network and finite-element models for elasticity and fracture....Pages 186-201 Ginzburg-Landau form description for steps on creep curves....Pages 202-220 Laboratory simulation of dielectric breakdown....Pages 221-234 Fracture roughness and physical implications....Pages 235-247 Rock fracturing by gas loading for well stimulation....Pages 248-260 Physics of random nonlinear composites....Pages 261-270 Scaling behavior of electric response in a non-linear composite....Pages 271-287 Non-linear effects at the critical supercurrent in Josephson Junctions arrays....Pages 288-308 Field-induced transport in random media....Pages 309-330 Percolation and tunneling in the quantum hall effect....Pages 331-340

There have been considerable advances in recent times in understanding many common material processes that are of practical importance, such as nonlinear response, fracture, breakdown, earthquakes, packing, and granular flow, that are of immense practical importance. This has been mainly due to new applications of statistical physics, including percolation theory, fractal concepts and self-organized criticality. This collection of articles brings together research in those closely allied fields. It deals with problems in material science involving random geometries and nonlinearity at a mesoscopic scale, where local disorder and nonlinearity influence the global behaviour of cracks, for example, and problems where randomness in time evolution is as crucial as the geometry itself.

This collection of articles assesses new applications of physics to the understanding of common material processes. It deals with problems in materials science involving random geometries and nonlinearity. The contributors are solid state physicists, materials scientists and engineers.