Sven will be presenting a talk entitled "A New Method for Identifying Defects in Disordered Solids" at 2:42pm on Wednesday March 5 at the APS March meeting in Denver: http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR14/Event/213759 Abstract: Characterizing defects in solids is an important step to developing continuum equations for failure in materials. Defects in crystalline solids (i.e. dislocations) are easy to…

A new version of our manuscript, "A random matrix definition of the boson peak", is now available on the arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.5904.  This new version highlights the connections between our work and Euclidean Random Matrices.  It also shows that our proposed universality class does not fall into the broad class of "Gaussian Wigner" matrices, which also…

Our paper with collaborators at UPenn and Princeton, Timon Idema, Julien O. Dubuis, Louis Kang, M. Lisa Manning, Philip C. Nelson, Tom C. Lubensky, Andrea J. Liu, "The Syncytial Drosophila Embryo as a Mechanically Excitable Medium” was recently published in PLOS ONE and is available online at http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077216.

Our paper on the mechanical behavior of three-dimensional embryonic tissues is now published in J. Royal Society Interface, and a news story about it is available here!

Dapeng Max Bi presented a poster entitled "Energy barriers govern glassy behavior in tissues", and Lisa Manning spoke on a panel about "Successful Careers in Physics" at the Gordon Research Seminar.

Group member Giuseppe Passucci passed the qualifying exam with flying colors. Congrats, Giuseppe.

Dapeng (Max) Bi, Jorge H. Lopez, Jen M. Schwarz, M. Lisa Manning. Energy barriers govern glassy dynamics in tissues.  http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.3891  The collective mechanical behavior of biological tissues strongly influences morphogenesis, cancer growth and wound healing. Recent observations demonstrate that confluent tissues exhibit features of glassy dynamics, such as caging behavior and dynamical heterogeneities, although it…

Eva-Maria Schoetz, Marcos Lanio, Jared A. Talbot, M. Lisa Manning. Glassy dynamics in three-dimensional embryonic tissues. http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.4454

ML Manning and AJ Liu. Universality of vibrational modes in the boson peak and random matrices : http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.5904