Sidney Nagel

Professor of Physics

Sidney Nagel
Address:
GCIS E217

Research

My group is interested in understanding the bahavior of systems that are far from equilibrium. Such out-of-equilibrium behavior can occur in disordered materails, such as glasses which form from supercooled liquids, where thermal energy is insufficient to allow an exploration of the relevant phase space. Understanding the jammed or glassy state of matter relies to a large extent on simulations. In fluids and granular materials external energy input can drive the system into transient or steady-state dynamics that allows new structures and patterns to form that wold not exist in equilibrium. One can also find important far-from-equilibrium behavior in systems which remember certain aspects of how they have been formed or manipulated. The work in our lab tries to address these issues via experiment.

Topics: Jamming, Instabilities and Pattern Formation, Singularities, Memories, and Splashing

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