Giuseppe Foffi from Laboratoire de Physique des Solides of Université Paris-Saclay will come to present his recent work at our lab on Thursday 4th July at 11:00 in room B021 (Bienvenüe). His presentation is entitled “From thermal to athermal systems: self-assembly and absorbing phase transitions in granular systems”.

For most of my scientific career I have been working under the comfortable blanket of equilibrium statistical mechanics in which modeling a physical system might be difficult, if not impossible, to solve but the rule of the game are clear. Clearly, this does not means that the results are trivial and in fact much we have learned even from simple models, such as hard spheres. However, things become incredibly more complex if the models we consider are dissipative. In this case, if enough energy is continuously provided, the systems can reach a steady state in which the physics becomes much less clear. In the last years, we have begun to work on vibrofluidized granular systems that represent the first simple step toward a dissipative hard sphere model. Our aim was to explore the analogy and differences between equilibrium and non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. In this talk, I will present numerical and experimental results in granular systems for two physical phenomena that have been discussed and observed in equilibrium, namely self-assembly and absorbing phase transition.