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Driven Soft and Active Granular Matter
A.K. Sood, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore,India
Recent years have seen unprecedented excitement, both in experiments and theory, in the arena of soft and granular matter under various driving fields. These studies provide new paradigm in non-equilibrium physics. My talk will cover our ongoing research in this area. The first example will discuss a collection of active polar granular rods subjected to vertical oscillations in a medium of non-polar particles showing spontaneous flocking seen for cells and locusts. These experiments are supplemented by simulations.
The second part of the talk will deal with shear induced phenomena in soft matter. We will show that under shear, mixed surfactant bilayer system shows reversible crystallization above the equilibrium Kraft temperature. We will also discuss how the particle morphology can lead to colossal shear thickening in very dilute suspensions of carbon nanotubes on varying the shear stress where the viscosity jumps sharply by five orders of magnitude in flocculated suspensions of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWNT) at very low weight fractions ( 0.5%).