Criticality of Interface Depinning and Origin of "Bump" in the Avalanche Distribution.

The depinning transition critical point is manifested as power-law distributed avalanches exhibited by slowly driven elastic interfaces in quenched random media. Here we show that since avalanches with different starting heights relative to the mean interface height or different initial local interface curvatures experience different excess driving forces due to elasticity, avalanches close to the "global" critical point of non-mean-field systems can be separated into populations of subcritical, critical, and supercritical ones. The asymmetric interface height distribution results in an excess of supercritical avalanches, manifested as a "bump" in the avalanche size distribution cutoff.

Magnetic domain wall dynamics studied by in-situ Lorentz microscopy with aid of custom-made Hall-effect sensor holder.

We built a custom-made holder with a Hall-effect sensor to measure the single point magnetic flux density inside a transmission electron microscope (TEM, JEM-F200, JEOL). The measurement point is at the same place as the sample inside the TEM. We utilized information collected with the Hall-effect sensor holder to study magnetic domain wall (DW) dynamics by in-situ Lorentz microscopy.

Barkhausen noise in disordered striplike ferromagnets: Experiment versus simulations.

In this work, we present a systematic comparison of the results obtained from the low-frequency Barkhausen noise recordings in nanocrystalline samples with those from the numerical simulations of the random-field Ising model systems. We performed measurements at room temperature on a field-driven metallic glass stripe made of VITROPERM 800 R, a nanocrystalline iron-based material with an excellent combination of soft and magnetic properties, making it a cutting-edge material for a wide range of applications. Given that the Barkhausen noise emissions emerging along a hysteresis curve are stochastic and depend in general on a variety of factors (such as distribution of disorder due to impurities or defects, varied size of crystal grains, type of domain structure, driving rate of the external magnetic field, sample shape and temperature, etc.

Reversible-to-irreversible transition of colloidal polycrystals under cyclic athermal quasistatic deformation.

Cyclic loading on granular packings and amorphous media exhibits a transition from reversible elastic behavior to irreversible plasticity. The present study compares the irreversibility transition and microscopic details of colloidal polycrystals under oscillatory tensile-compressive and shear strain. Under both modes, the systems exhibit a reversible to irreversible transition.

Predicting elastic and plastic properties of small iron polycrystals by machine learning.

Deformation of crystalline materials is an interesting example of complex system behaviour. Small samples typically exhibit a stochastic-like, irregular response to externally applied stresses, manifested as significant sample-to-sample variation in their mechanical properties. In this work we study the predictability of the sample-dependent shear moduli and yield stresses of a large set of small cube-shaped iron polycrystals generated by Voronoi tessellation, by combining molecular dynamics simulations and machine learning.

Asymmetric Roughness of Elastic Interfaces at the Depinning Threshold.

Roughness of driven elastic interfaces in random media is typically understood to be characterized by a single roughness exponent ζ. We show that at the depinning threshold, due to symmetry breaking caused by the direction of the driving force, elastic interfaces with local, long-range, and mean-field elasticity exhibit asymmetric roughness. It is manifested as a skewed distribution of the local interface heights, and can be quantified by using detrended fluctuation analysis to compute a spectrum of local, segment-level scaling exponents.

Effect of thresholding on avalanches and their clustering for interfaces with long-range elasticity.

Avalanches are often defined as signals higher than some detection level in bursty systems. The choice of the detection threshold affects the number of avalanches, but it can also affect their temporal correlations. We simulated the depinning of a long-range elastic interface and applied different thresholds including a zero one on the data to see how the sizes and durations of events change and how this affects temporal avalanche clustering.

Depinning Exponents of Thin Film Domain Walls Depend on Disorder Strength.

Domain wall dynamics in ferromagnets is complicated by internal degrees of freedom of the domain walls. We develop a model of domain walls in disordered thin films with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy capturing such features, and use it to study the depinning transition. For weak disorder, excitations of the internal magnetization are rare, and the depinning transition takes on exponent values of the quenched Edwards-Wilkinson equation.

Dislocation avalanches from strain-controlled loading: A discrete dislocation dynamics study.

We study strain-controlled plastic deformation of crystalline solids via two-dimensional discrete dislocation dynamics simulations. To this end, we characterize the average stress-strain curves as well as the statistical properties of strain bursts and the related stress drops as a function of the imposed strain rate and the stiffness of the specimen-machine system. The dislocation system exhibits strain-rate sensitivity such that a larger imposed strain rate results in a higher average stress at a given strain.

Effects of external noise on threshold-induced correlations in ferromagnetic systems.

In the present paper we investigate the impact of the external noise and detection threshold level on the simulation data for the systems that evolve through metastable states. As a representative model of such systems we chose the nonequilibrium athermal random-field Ising model with two types of the external noise, uniform white noise and Gaussian white noise with various different standard deviations, imposed on the original response signal obtained in model simulations. We applied a wide range of detection threshold levels in analysis of the signal and show how these quantities affect the values of exponent γ_{S/T} (describing the scaling of the average avalanche size with duration), the shift of waiting time between the avalanches, and finally the collapses of the waiting time distributions.

Impurity-induced nematic-isotropic transition of liquid crystals.

Complex fluids made of liquid crystals (LCs) and small molecules, surfactants, nanoparticles or 1D/2D nanomaterials show novel and interesting features, making them suitable materials for various applications starting from optoelectronics to biosensing. While these additives (impurities) introduce new features in the complex fluids, they may also alter the phase transition behaviour of LCs depending on the physiochemical properties of the added impurity. This article reports on the phase transition of 4-cyano-4'-alkylbiphenyl (nCB) LCs in the presence of an associative impurity, i.

Propagating bands of plastic deformation in a metal alloy as critical avalanches.

The plastic deformation of metal alloys localizes in the Portevin-Le Chatelier effect in bands of different types, including propagating, or type "A" bands, usually characterized by their width and a typical propagation velocity. This plastic instability arises from collective dynamics of dislocations interacting with mobile solute atoms, but the resulting sensitivity to the strain rate lacks fundamental understanding. Here, we show, by using high-resolution imaging in tensile deformation experiments of an aluminum alloy, that the band velocities exhibit large fluctuations.

Barkhausen Noise from Precessional Domain Wall Motion.

The jerky dynamics of domain walls driven by applied magnetic fields in disordered ferromagnets-the Barkhausen effect-is a paradigmatic example of crackling noise. We study Barkhausen noise in disordered Pt/Co/Pt thin films due to precessional motion of domain walls using full micromagnetic simulations, allowing for a detailed description of the domain wall internal structure. In this regime the domain walls contain topological defects known as Bloch lines which repeatedly nucleate, propagate, and annihilate within the domain wall during the Barkhausen jumps.

Machine learning plastic deformation of crystals.

Plastic deformation of micron-scale crystalline solids exhibits stress-strain curves with significant sample-to-sample variations. It is a pertinent question if this variability is purely random or to some extent predictable. Here we show, by employing machine learning techniques such as regression neural networks and support vector machines that deformation predictability evolves with strain and crystal size.

Nanoscale liquid crystal lubrication controlled by surface structure and film composition.

Liquid crystals have emerged as potential candidates for next-generation lubricants due to their tendency to exhibit long-range ordering. Here, we construct a full atomistic model of 4-cyano-4-hexylbiphenyl (6CB) nematic liquid crystal lubricants mixed with hexane and confined by mica surfaces. We explore the effect of the surface structure of mica, as well as lubricant composition and thickness, on the nanoscale friction in the system.

Moving magnets in a micromagnetic finite-difference framework.

We present a method and an implementation for smooth linear motion in a finite-difference-based micromagnetic simulation code, to be used in simulating magnetic friction and other phenomena involving moving microscale magnets. Our aim is to accurately simulate the magnetization dynamics and relative motion of magnets while retaining high computational speed. To this end, we combine techniques for fast scalar potential calculation and cubic b-spline interpolation, parallelizing them on a graphics processing unit (GPU).

A surface topography analysis of the curling stone curl mechanism.

The curling motion of the curling stone on ice is well-known: if a small clockwise rotational velocity is imposed to the stone when it is released, in addition to the linear propagation velocity, the stone will curl to the right. A similar curl to the left is obtained by counter-clockwise rotation. This effect is widely used in the game to reach spots behind the already thrown stones, and the rotation also causes the stone to propagate in a more predictable fashion.

Effects of precipitates and dislocation loops on the yield stress of irradiated iron.

Plastic deformation of crystalline materials is governed by the features of stress-driven motion of dislocations. In the case of irradiated steels subject to applied stresses, small dislocation loops as well as precipitates are known to interfere with the dislocation motion, leading to an increased yield stress as compared to pure crystals. We study the combined effect of precipitates and interstitial glissile [Formula: see text] dislocation loops on the yield stress of iron, using large-scale three-dimensional discrete dislocation dynamics simulations.

Threshold-induced correlations in the Random Field Ising Model.

We present a numerical study of the correlations in the occurrence times of consecutive crackling noise events in the nonequilibrium zero-temperature Random Field Ising model in three dimensions. The critical behavior of the system is portrayed by the intermittent bursts of activity known as avalanches with scale-invariant properties which are power-law distributed. Our findings, based on the scaling analysis and collapse of data collected in extensive simulations show that the observed correlations emerge upon applying a finite threshold to the pertaining signals when defining events of interest.

Excitation Spectra in Crystal Plasticity.

Plastically deforming crystals exhibit scale-free fluctuations that are similar to those observed in driven disordered elastic systems close to depinning, but the nature of the yielding critical point is still debated. Here, we study the marginal stability of ensembles of dislocations and compute their excitation spectrum in two and three dimensions. Our results show the presence of a singularity in the distribution of excitation stresses, i.

Interevent Correlations from Avalanches Hiding Below the Detection Threshold.

Numerous systems ranging from deformation of materials to earthquakes exhibit bursty dynamics, which consist of a sequence of events with a broad event size distribution. Very often these events are observed to be temporally correlated or clustered, evidenced by power-law-distributed waiting times separating two consecutive activity bursts. We show how such interevent correlations arise simply because of a finite detection threshold, created by the limited sensitivity of the measurement apparatus, or used to subtract background activity or noise from the activity signal.

Mixture of Clustered Bayesian Neural Networks for Modeling Friction Processes at the Nanoscale.

Friction and wear are the source of every mechanical device failure, and lubricants are essential for the operation of the devices. These physical phenomena have a complex nature so that no model capable of accurately predicting the behavior of lubricants exists. Thus, lubricants cannot be designed from scratch but have to be screened through expensive trial-error tests.

Predicting sample lifetimes in creep fracture of heterogeneous materials.

Materials flow-under creep or constant loads-and, finally, fail. The prediction of sample lifetimes is an important and highly challenging problem because of the inherently heterogeneous nature of most materials that results in large sample-to-sample lifetime fluctuations, even under the same conditions. We study creep deformation of paper sheets as one heterogeneous material and thus show how to predict lifetimes of individual samples by exploiting the "universal" features in the sample-inherent creep curves, particularly the passage to an accelerating creep rate.

Multiscale modeling of dislocation-precipitate interactions in Fe: From molecular dynamics to discrete dislocations.

The stress-driven motion of dislocations in crystalline solids, and thus the ensuing plastic deformation process, is greatly influenced by the presence or absence of various pointlike defects such as precipitates or solute atoms. These defects act as obstacles for dislocation motion and hence affect the mechanical properties of the material. Here we combine molecular dynamics studies with three-dimensional discrete dislocation dynamics simulations in order to model the interaction between different kinds of precipitates and a 1/2〈111〉{110} edge dislocation in BCC iron.

Creep turns linear in narrow ferromagnetic nanostrips.

The motion of domain walls in magnetic materials is a typical example of a creep process, usually characterised by a stretched exponential velocity-force relation. By performing large-scale micromagnetic simulations, and analyzing an extended 1D model which takes the effects of finite temperatures and material defects into account, we show that this creep scaling law breaks down in sufficiently narrow ferromagnetic strips. Our analysis of current-driven transverse domain wall motion in disordered Permalloy nanostrips reveals instead a creep regime with a linear dependence of the domain wall velocity on the applied field or current density.