PROFESSOR SURAJIT SEN

The colloquium shall focus on the rich physics associated with mechanical energy transport through artificially constructed granular systems such as the Newton’s cradle, and decorated 2D and 3D granular structures with closed or random packing. Mechanical energy travels as a solitary wave in 1D granular systems. Such a system turns out to be non-integrable, thereby leading the solitary waves to break down and form again during collisions, thus giving rise to large energy fluctuations (rogue fluctuations as in rogue waves), and very slow relaxation in the non-dissipative limit, a topic of interest in non-equilibrium statistical physics. The speaker will touch upon impact decimation in decorated 1D, 2D and 3D granular systems, which is becoming a mature topic now and turns out to be of interest to the blast mitigation community. He will close with some comments on crater formation during impact onto a 3D bed. (This research has been partially supported by the US Army Research Office.)