MechE Colloquium: Instabilities and Catastrophes in Granular Matter: Dangers of Life without a Hamiltonian
Event details
| Date | 19.11.2019 |
| Hour | 12:15 › 13:15 |
| Speaker | Prof. Itamar Procaccia, Department of Chemical & Biological Physics, Weizmann Institute of Science |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract:
Friction between the constituents of granular matter is unavoidable. The immediate consequence is that frictional amorphous solids do not possess a Hamiltonian from which the interactions forces are derivable. In this lecture I will discuss the consequences, foremost being the existence of novel instabilities that can lead to catastrophic failures and new physics. Consequences for long standing problems like remote triggering in geophysics and transition from static to dynamic friction will be drawn.
Bio:
Itamar Procaccia is an Israeli physicist and chemist who has made contributions to areas in statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, and turbulence. Procaccia studied chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with and obtained a bachelor's degree in 1973 and obtained a doctorate in theoretical chemistry in 1976. From 1977 to 1979, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1979 he has been at the Weizmann Institute, where he became a professor in 1985.
With Peter Grassberger, he introduced the correlation dimension as a measure of fractal dimension in 1983 (often referred to as the Grassberger–Procaccia algorithm). He has held guest appointments at the City University of New York, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Nordita, the Isaac Newton Institute, Rockefeller University, the École normale supérieure de Lyon, and the University of Chicago, among others. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics and a member of the Leopoldina and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. In 2009 he received the Israel Prize for physics. In 2017 he received the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Prize.
Friction between the constituents of granular matter is unavoidable. The immediate consequence is that frictional amorphous solids do not possess a Hamiltonian from which the interactions forces are derivable. In this lecture I will discuss the consequences, foremost being the existence of novel instabilities that can lead to catastrophic failures and new physics. Consequences for long standing problems like remote triggering in geophysics and transition from static to dynamic friction will be drawn.
Bio:
Itamar Procaccia is an Israeli physicist and chemist who has made contributions to areas in statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, and turbulence. Procaccia studied chemistry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with and obtained a bachelor's degree in 1973 and obtained a doctorate in theoretical chemistry in 1976. From 1977 to 1979, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since 1979 he has been at the Weizmann Institute, where he became a professor in 1985.
With Peter Grassberger, he introduced the correlation dimension as a measure of fractal dimension in 1983 (often referred to as the Grassberger–Procaccia algorithm). He has held guest appointments at the City University of New York, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Nordita, the Isaac Newton Institute, Rockefeller University, the École normale supérieure de Lyon, and the University of Chicago, among others. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics and a member of the Leopoldina and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. In 2009 he received the Israel Prize for physics. In 2017 he received the EPS Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Prize.
Practical information
- General public
- Free