My long-term research goal is to enable real robots to manipulate any kind of object so that they can perform many different tasks in...
Jan23
Memory in a Glassy Landscape
Sidney Nagel, Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor, The James Franck Institute, The Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Department of Physics, The University of Chicago
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Out-of-equilibrium systems preserve memories of their formation and training history in a variety of ways allowing for an innovative classification of material and dynamics. I will discuss one case where a cyclically sheared suspension of particles or a charge-density-wave solid (or even a walk in the park!) remembers multiple values from a series of training inputs yet forgets all but two of them at long times despite their continued repetition; however, if noise is added all the memories can be encoded indefinitely! When the packing density is increased, so that the particles become jammed, the evolution takes place in a very rugged energy landscape where scores of local energy minima are visited during each applied oscillation. Nevertheless the jammed solid can readily find the periodic orbits. Memory formation in such a system not only sheds light on how glassy ground states are selected and communicate with one another but also shows a form of memory that allows a new probe of the interactions within a material.
About Sidney Nagel, Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor
In my work, I focus on problems where the physics of disorder and far-from-equilibrium behavior play crucial roles. Of particular delight is when table-top experiments have analogs in disparate fields at widely different scales. I have studied the glass transition, the phenomenology of granular material, and the physics of jamming; I have also focused on pattern and singularity formation in fluid interfaces. One of my current interests is the investigation of memory formation in out-of-equilibrium matter.
Audience: Public
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