The O'Hern group uses both theoretical and computational methods to investigate jamming and glass transitions, in which systems change from an ergodic and mobile state to an immobile and solid-like yet disordered state, in a variety of soft condensed matter systems. Examples include flowing granular materials that become static packings as the shear stress is lowered below the yield stress, supercooled liquids that become amorphous glasses when the temperature is quickly cooled below the glass transition temperature, and colloidal suspensions that become colloidal glasses when the density of the system is rapidly increased to random close packing. Recent studies have shown that these systems display common behavior, such as extremely long relaxation times, cooperative dynamics with large spatial correlations, and anisotropic and nonlinear response, near the jamming threshold. Our research is focused on providing fundamental explanations for these phenomena and eventually developing a unified theoretical picture for systems near jamming.

The research efforts of the O'Hern group are fairly evenly divided among the following topics: 1) jamming in granular materials, 2) jamming and slow dynamics in quasi-one dimensional and confined systems, and 3) thermodynamic descriptions of driven, dissipative systems.

Announcement!

Please consider sending your top graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to the upcoming 2006 Boulder Summer School on the "Physics of Soft Matter: Complex Fluids and Biological Materials" organized by Tony Dinsmore (UMass), Eric Dufresne (Yale), Corey O'Hern (Yale), and Tom Powers (Brown)