In a recent rapid communication (see attached paper), using principles of pattern formation, we expose some simple stategies to reliably produce perfect long range order in self-assembling systems. Most self-assembling systems exhibit short ranged order. This imperfection is detrimental to several practical applications. It is almost always possible to produce perfect patterns in small domain sizes but self-assembly over a larger areal span results in defects.

Xin-Lin Gao and I had the pleasure of guest-editing a special  issue on "scale effects in mechanics" for the journal, Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids (editor: Professor David Steigmann , UC Berkeley).

Professor Jerry Ericksen (Timoshenko awardee, 1979 ) kindly provided an authoritative review of the Cauchy-Born rule. In addition, the special issue contains six other notable papers. Interested folks can get an overview of the special issue and the contained papers by reading the attached preface.

(Carbon) Nanotubes have attracted considerable attention from the mechanics community; probably second to none when it comes to nanotechnologies. Although I personally have done very little in this particular topic, I have enjoyed reading about the many developments made by mechanicians in terms of modeling the behavior of nanotubes and the applicability of standard continuum mechanics notions. A post on this subject on iMechanica, which received a fair amount of attention from many mechanicians involved in this topic, may be found here .

University of Houston
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Cullen College of Engineering
Faculty Position-Nano Mechanics, Nano Materials

For many mechanicians and materials scientists one of the most confounding things (in the ever increasing literature on carbon nanotubes) is the reported theoretical value of the nanotube elastic modulus. Depending upon the specific paper at hand, the reported numerical values range from 1 -6 TPa! This scatter is known as “Yakobson’s Paradox” after Boris Yakobson (Rice University) who first discussed this. In a recent paper, Young Huang and co-workers address this issue and provide a resolution.

I had posted this on the amd blog...I am posting it here as well:

Last year I attended the annual American Physical Society conference held in Baltimore (during the week of March 13th). One of the non-technical sessions included presentations by the APS journal editors--Physical Review A/B/C/D/E and Letters---and a panel discussion related to these journals. Since many of our mechanics and materials colleagues nowadays are interested in publishing in these journals, I thought I should post a link to some of the slides (from the editors presentation) that I found interesting. Many of the slides presented at APS are in the linked pdf file that also includes additional (humorous slides!) regarding reviewer issues.

I thought I should take advantage of iMechanica and obtain feedback on some recent work that we did on nonlinear stability analysis of patterns.

A paradigmatic model that governs monolayer self-assembly was constructed a few years back by Wei Lu (Michigan) and Zhigang Suo. Apart from obtaining several physical insights they also conducted a linear stability analysis of their model. Borrowing technqiues from the nonlinear physics community, our work presents nonlinear stability analysis i.e. the initial state is no longer homogeneous and stable states beyond the transition are calculated. This allows a detailed construction of stability maps for various patterns without extensive numerical calculations.

This work is currently under review and I am attaching a pre-print with this post. Any comments and suggestions would be well-appreciated.

A student pointed me to a recent article on physicsweb. This article discusses a new (scientific) ranking system developed by a German student (Michael Banks) in Max Planck Institute of Solid State Physics to characterize the "hotness" of the scientific subject. If, after reading the popular physicsweb article linked above, you are interested in more details you may wish to read the attached original article posted by Banks. "Carbon nanotubes" emerges at the top of the list.

Hello everyone,

I had previously posted this entry on the AMD blog and perhaps it worthwhile to post it again on this forum. I would like to solicit feedback and comments on an idea to further enhance the role and utility of iMechanica.

This inspiration comes from Bell labs and the physics community.....

They started a journal club (year 2003). Each month ONLY 2-3 already published recent journal papers are reviewed and commentary posted in the form of a newsletter. Since only 2-3 papers are reviewed, the selection is much more stringent and careful. The contribution is regular and periodic (monthly). Hence, this newsletter is taken seriously by physicists.

In our case, this can be done within iMechanica. I suspect we could achieve the same kind of interest if we restrict "notable" papers to 1-3 per month and make it a regular monthly feature. In principle anyone could submit a commentary but the blog moderators will select the top 2-3.

The operational rules are open for discussion. Briefly though, I am thinking on the lines of rotating 1-2 moderators with a term of say 2 months. The moderator will receive commentaries on recently published papers RELATED to mechanics area. The moderator will highlight 1-3 notable commentaries in the journal club newsletter. A key requirement must be that the commentaries/paper highlighted are related to mechanics in some form or the other. The concept of rotating moderator is to provide breadth and prevent bias of any one individual. Rotation of journal club moderators will also keep the "work-load" well distributed.

Perhaps a post has already been made in this regard; A book containing all the papers by J.D. Eshelby was recently released by Springer. This book is compiled by Markenscoff and Gupta. Congratulations to both of them for such a great idea!

I bought this book last week and it is fascinating to read all of Eshelby's papers in chronological order. Furthermore, I found a few papers that I had not even been aware of. The price, at roughly $195 on Amazon is a bit steep but (in my opinion) well worth it. The book also contains forewords by several researcher who knew Eshelby personally.

Here is the amazon link to this book