BACKGROUND Colloids consist of solid or liquid particles, each about a few hundred
nanometers in size, dispersed in a fluid and kept suspended by thermal fluctuations …

In 1989, Sir Sam Edwards made the visionary proposition to treat jammed granular materials
using a volume ensemble of equiprobable jammed states in analogy to thermal equilibrium …

Uncovering grain-scale mechanisms that underlie the disorder–order transition in
assemblies of dissipative, athermal particles is a fundamental problem with technological …

Optimal transport (\OT) theory defines a powerful set of tools to compare probability
distributions.\OT~ suffers however from a few drawbacks, computational and statistical …

Characterizing forces on deformable objects intruding into sand and soil requires
understanding the solid-and fluid-like responses of such substrates and their effect on the …

Algebraic topology methods have recently played an important role for statistical analysis
with complicated geometric structured data such as shapes, linked twist maps, and material …

Community detection is the process of grouping strongly connected nodes in a network.
Many community detection methods for un-weighted networks have a theoretical basis in a …

Starting from three-dimensional volume data of a granular packing, as, eg, obtained by X-ray
Computed Tomography, we discuss methods to first detect the individual particles in the …

Persistent homology, while ostensibly measuring changes in topology, captures multiscale
geometrical information. It is a natural tool for the analysis of point patterns. In this paper we …

We present an experiment on crystallization of packings of macroscopic granular spheres.
This system is often considered to be a model for thermally driven atomic or colloidal …