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Colloidal Suspensions and Granular Materials


Stored elasticity, emerging plasticity, and recovery of rigidity in yield stress fluids


October 20, 2025 (Monday) 10:30


Track 1 / Sweeney Ballroom A

(Click on name to view author profile)

  1. Bayer, Logan (Georgetown University, Department of Physics)
  2. Vinutha, H A (Department of Physics, Georgetown College, Georgetown Univer)
  3. Del Gado, Emanuela (Georgetown University, Department of Physics)

(in printed abstract book)
Logan Bayer, H A Vinutha and Emanuela Del Gado
Department of Physics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057


Bayer, Logan


computational methods; granular materials; non-Newtonian fluids; particualte systems; rheometry; suspensions


Yield stress fluids easily build-up residual stresses. We have used large-scale simulations of soft jammed particles to disentangle the role of stored elasticity and the emerging plasticity during stress relaxation to understand the build-up of residual stress [2]. Our simulations provide evidence of a power-law distribution of inter-times between plastic events which underpin the power-law decay in the stress relaxation. The plastic events are identified by the change in locally stiffer (icosahedrally-packed) regions. The number of icosahedrally-packed regions increase and rearrange over time as the system recovers mechanical equilibrium. Our results suggest that the recovery of rigidity may be related to a percolation of these locally stiffer regions which controls the residual stress build-up. We discuss these results in the context of elastoplastic models and recent experiments [1]. [1] Vinutha, HA et al., “Memory of shear flow in soft jammed materials”, PNAS Nexus 3 (2024): 441 [2] Vinutha, HA, Bayer, L., and Del Gado, E., in preparation (2025)