Because of their disordered atomic structure, amorphous metals (termed metallic glasses) have fundamentally different deformation mechanisms compared with polycrystalline metals. These different mechanisms give metallic glasses high strength, but the extent to which they affect other macroscopic deformation properties is uncertain. For example, the nature of the plastic-yield criterion is a poi...

Maximally random jammed (MRJ) particle packings can be viewed as prototypical glasses in that they are maximally disordered while simultaneously being mechanically rigid. The prediction of the MRJ packing density ϕMRJ, among other packing properties of frictionless particles, still poses many theoretical challenges, even for congruent spheres or disks. Using the geometric-structure approach, we...

Place a water glass at each integer point, the one at the origin being full and all others empty, and consider averaging procedures where we repeatedly pick a pair of adjacent glasses and pool their contents, leaving the two glasses with equal amounts but with the total amount unchanged. Some simple results are derived for what kinds of configurations of water levels are obtainable via such pro...

Dynamical heterogeneities--strong fluctuations near the glass transition--are believed to be crucial to explain much of the glass transition phenomenology. One hypothesis for their origin is that they emerge from soft (Goldstone) modes associated with a broken continuous symmetry under time reparametrizations. To test this hypothesis, we use numerical simulation data to construct coarse grained...

investigating how brains work or building intelligent machines or creating “smart” environments such as a house that can identify and track its occupants. But what about making people smarter? To accomplish this goal, one can consider biochemistry or bioimplants, but the easiest way to improve intelligence is by augmenting the items we wear all the time—glasses, wristwatches, clothes and shoes—...