UNC-CH Physics and Astronomy Thesis Proposal Presentation

Christopher Moakler

“Predicting Granular Material Dynamics via Mapping the Potential Energy Surface”

Granular materials are a ubiquitous yet ill-understood class of media. Many different approaches and techniques have been developed to understand the many complex behaviors they exhibit but, none have been completely successful. I have instituted a novel means to understand granular materials. This novel method, the Hydra Method, is an efficient and autonomous way to trawl the potential energy surface of a granular material to enumerate the saddles, minima, and connections between them. I will apply the Hydra Method to bi-disperse configurations of soft spheres to map out ensembles of pathways between stable packings of the system. With these ensembles, I will predict likely transitions the granular material will undergo between those stable packings.