Events

School Venue and Date

Venue: Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

Date: 20.11.2022-25.11.2022.

Additional information: Participants will stay at the guest house of the Weizmann Institute. We expect arrival on Sunday, November 20, 2022. The school will run from Monday morning to Friday noon, such that participants can leave on Friday, November 25, or Saturday, November 26, 2022.

 

Application

To apply for participation in this winter school please write an email to Thomas Franosch (Thomas.Franosch@uibk.ac.at). Free slots for lightning talks and posters are available (details below). There are also limited vacant slots for contributed talks. Please include a title and an abstract to your application if you want to contribute a poster and/or a talk.

 

Important Dates

To be announced.

 

Content and Subject Area

Amorphous materials are ubiquitous in application, and understanding their macroscopic properties is a major aim for materials science and statistical physics. Typically, amorphous materials are produced from the melt, following non-equilibrium quenches into the solid state. Amorphous materials are also produced in nature by self-assembly or by driven, active processes in biology to impair functions such as structural color or mechanical stability.

Therefore, fundamental questions arise in how to describe material properties that depend on the processing history. Also, many amorphous materials of technological interest as new functional materials are meso-structured, which renders them prone to strongly nonlinear and heterogeneous response even under moderate driving forces.

Theoretical approaches to describe such phenomena are routed in different approaches: one can start from the rheology of an increasingly viscous/visco-elastic fluid, or from the statistical mechanics of a low-temperature system with frozen disorder. The former approach naturally puts emphasis on temporal, non-Markovian history effects, while the latter emphasizes the role of spatial heterogeneities and elasto-plastic interactions. It is at the liquid-solid transition where these approaches need to meet, but it is still open how a unified physical picture emerges from this.

The aim of this Minerva school is to present to young researchers the various approaches that are relevant for dealing with amorphous materials, and to stipulate exchange between the different theories. This reflects recent research, for example the elaboration of the nonlinear rheology of deformable particles, the discovery of elastic stress- and strain-correlations even in the liquid, the elucidation of phonon transport and vibrational excitations in disordered media, or the addition of thermal effects to the deformation of amorphous solids.

 

Course of the Programme

The school will be centered on five days of lectures, each corresponding to one of the major topics listed above, and typically
represented by overview lectures followed by complementary smaller lectures given by experts in the fields.

Attendees are encouraged to bring posters highlighting their research. Posters will be displayed over the entire duration of the school, and there will be a dedicated poster session at the first day of the workshop with the opportunity for participants to highlight their contributions in 3-minute lightning talks. This will help participants to present their research interests early on, fostering discussion among the participants and with the lecturers.

Time is alotted for round table discussions and/or free time in order to discover possible future collaboration projects.