Undergraduate students
Graduate students
Z. Žeravčić
Zorana completed her studies in physics at the University of Belgrade in the summer of 2006. She then joined our group to pursue a PhD in granular media research. Together with David Nelson from Harvard, we are investigating localization effects in granular packings. Our original intention was to study whether localization effects change when these packings become almost isostatic upon approaching the jamming point at small pressures. These effects are essentially invisible, but many other surprising results are coming out.J.-W. van de Meent
Jan-Willem did his experimental work as an undergraduate student with Martin van Hecke on granular media; he he contributed significantly to work on wide shear zones and also spent half a year with Clement in Paris. After returning to Leiden he his masters project with Alexander Morozov and me on the applicability of so-called DPD (Dissipative Particle Dynamics) models to simulate turbulent flows: DPD simulation were shown by him to be powerful enough to study weak turbulence in a compressible fluid. In september 2006, Jan-Willem started in Cambridge to pursue a PhD jointly with Ray Goldstein and me. He is working on cytoplasmic streaming.Erik Woldhuis
Erik Woldhuis joined the group in September 2007 as a master student. Together with Brian Tighe and me he investigated to what extent the so-called spot model for the quasistatic flow of granular media can be extended to understand the wide shear zones in granular media discovered in recent years in the group of Martin van Hecke. After obtaining his masters degree in June 2008, Erik stayed as a graduate student of Martin van Hecke and me. He is presently working on theory of bubble and foam dynamics.
Postdocs
B. Tighe
Brian got his PhD with Joshua Socolar at Duke University in the USA in the summer of 2006. The topic of his PhD research was force correlations (force chains) in static granular media. One of the contributions Brian made was to invent a smart monte carlo move ("wheel move") that allows one to sample very effectively the states in the so-called force ensemble for granular matter. This allowed him to unravel many questions concerning the force distributions. Brian joined us in Leiden in October 2006. Brian is working on dynamic properties of granular matter, amoung other things, and on the rheology of foams as well.S. Henkes
Silke got her PhD with Bulbul Chakraborty at Brandeis University in the USA in the summer of 2008. One of the main topics of her thesis was the development of a theory for the distributions of stresses in granular media at the coarse grained level, so for clusters of particles. In Leiden Silke is now working with several of the group members on the properties of frictional granular packing. Preliminary results of Silke show that if the fact that a finite fraction of forces is fully mobilized is taken into account, the granular packings do have an enhanced density of states near jamming at any value of the friction coefficient.
[Former students and postdocs] [Collaborators] [Wim van Saarloos] [Instituut-Lorentz]