arXiv subjects

Matteo Lulli

Publications and source records attributed to Matteo Lulli.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

Spatial heterogeneities in structural temperature cause Kovacs expansion gap paradox in aging of glasses

Volume and enthalpy relaxation of glasses after a sudden temperature change has been extensively studied since Kovacs seminal work. One observes an asymmetric approach to equilibrium upon cooling versus heating and, more counter-intuitively, the expansion gap paradox, i.e. a dependence on the initial temperature of the effective relaxation time even close to equilibrium when heating. Here we show that a distinguishable-particles lattice model can capture both the asymmetry and the expansion gap. We quantitatively characterize the energetic states of the particles configurations using a physical realization of the fictive temperature called the structural temperature, which, in the heating case, displays a strong spatial heterogeneity. The system relaxes by nucleation and expansion of warmer mobile domains having attained the final temperature, against cooler immobile domains maintained at the initial temperature. A small population of these cooler regions persists close to equilibrium, thus explaining the paradox.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2018

Metastability at the Yield-Stress Transition in Soft Glasses

We study the solid-to-liquid transition in a two-dimensional fully periodic soft-glassy model with an imposed spatially heterogeneous stress. The model we consider consists of droplets of a dispersed phase jammed together in a continuous phase. When the peak value of the stress gets close to the yield stress of the material, we find that the whole system intermittently tunnels to a metastable "fluidized" state, which relaxes back to a metastable "solid" state by means of an elastic-wave dissipation. This macroscopic scenario is studied through the microscopic displacement field of the droplets, whose time statistics displays a remarkable bimodality. Metastability is rooted in the existence, in a given stress range, of two distinct stable rheological branches as well as long-range correlations (e.g., large dynamic heterogeneity) developed in the system. Finally, we show that a similar behavior holds for a pressure-driven flow, thus suggesting possible experimental tests.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2016

Fluidization and wall slip of soft-glassy materials by controlled surface roughness

The motion of soft-glassy materials (SGM) in a confined geometry is strongly impacted by surface roughness. However, the effect of the spatial distribution of the roughness remains poorly understood from a more quantitative viewpoint. Here we present a comprehensive study of concentrated emulsions flowing in microfluidic channels, one wall of which is patterned with micron-size equally spaced grooves oriented perpendicularly to the flow direction. We show that roughness-induced fluidization can be quantitatively tailored by systematically changing both the width and separation of the grooves. We find that a simple scaling law describes such fluidization as a function of the density of grooves, suggesting common scenarios for droplet trapping and release. Numerical simulations confirm these views and are used to elucidate the relation between fluidization and the rate of plastic rearrangements.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2016

GPU Based Detection of Topological Changes in Voronoi Diagrams

The Voronoi diagrams are an important tool having theoretical and practical applications in a large number of fields. We present a new procedure, implemented as a set of CUDA kernels, which detects, in a general and efficient way, topological changes in case of dynamic Voronoi diagrams whose generating points move in time. The solution that we provide has been originally developed to identify plastic events during simulations of soft-glassy materials based on a Lattice Boltzmann model with frustrated-short range attractive and mid/long-range repulsive-interactions. Along with the description of our approach, we present also some preliminary physics results.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2016

Fluidisation and plastic activity in a model soft-glassy material flowing in micro-channels with rough walls

By means of mesoscopic numerical simulations of a model soft-glassy material, we investigate the role of boundary roughness on the flow behaviour of the material, probing the bulk/wall and global/local rheologies. We show that the roughness reduces the wall slip induced by wettability properties and acts as a source of fluidisation for the material. A direct inspection of the plastic events suggests that their rate of occurrence grows with the fluidity field, reconciling our simulations with kinetic elasto-plastic descriptions of jammed materials. Notwithstanding, we observe qualitative and quantitative differences in the scaling, depending on the distance from the rough wall and on the imposed shear. The impact of roughness on the orientational statistics is also studied.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2015

Off-equilibrium finite-size method for critical behavior analyses

We present a new dynamic off-equilibrium method for the study of continuous transitions, which represents a dynamic generalization of the usual equilibrium cumulant method. Its main advantage is that critical parameters are derived from numerical data obtained much before equilibrium has been attained. Therefore, the method is particularly useful for systems with long equilibration times, like spin glasses. We apply it to the three-dimensional Ising spin-glass model, obtaining accurate estimates of the critical exponents and of the critical temperature with a limited computational effort.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗

arXiv2014

Highly optimized simulations on single- and multi-GPU systems of 3D Ising spin glass

We present a highly optimized implementation of a Monte Carlo (MC) simulator for the three-dimensional Ising spin-glass model with bimodal disorder, i.e., the 3D Edwards-Anderson model running on CUDA enabled GPUs. Multi-GPU systems exchange data by means of the Message Passing Interface (MPI). The chosen MC dynamics is the classic Metropolis one, which is purely dissipative, since the aim was the study of the critical off-equilibrium relaxation of the system. We focused on the following issues: i) the implementation of efficient access patterns for nearest neighbours in a cubic stencil and for lagged-Fibonacci-like pseudo-Random Numbers Generators (PRNGs); ii) a novel implementation of the asynchronous multispin-coding Metropolis MC step allowing to store one spin per bit and iii) a multi-GPU version based on a combination of MPI and CUDA streams. We highlight how cubic stencils and PRNGs are two subjects of very general interest because of their widespread use in many simulation codes. Our code best performances ~3 and ~5 psFlip on a GTX Titan with our implementations of the MINSTD and MT19937 respectively.

cond-mat.dis-nn↗