Georgetown research featured on the cover of Nature Physics

Posted in News Story

Prof. David Egolf and a team of three former Georgetown undergraduates, Edward Banigan (C’07), Matthew Illich (C’11), and Derick Stace-Naughton (C’11), have had their research featured on the cover of the prestigious journal Nature Physics. They uncovered dynamical mechanisms behind the intriguing phenomenon of granular “jamming”, in which free-flowing grains (sand, oranges, pharmaceuticals, etc.) develop into a disordered, solid-like state when the density is high enough. When stresses are imposed on the jammed state, dramatic, intermittent, stress-release events occur. The team showed that nonlinear dynamical techniques can used to predict the times and locations of these earthquake-like events. The research was also recently featured as a news article on the University home page.