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Information

Dates

SUMMER SCHOOL from Monday 4 December to Friday 8 December 2006.
WORKSHOP on Thursday 7 December.

Attendance

Both workshop and summer school are open to all interested scientists and students. However, the workshop will focus on cutting-edge new advancements in the field. Conversely, the school will be designed to give a general overview on the science of granular media accessible also to students without any previous background on the subject. Attendance is limited to 100 participants.

Background

Granular materials are everywhere; they are central in a very wide range of domains from agriculture to pharmaceutical industry. The capability to handling, processing, storing and producing granular materials is of paramount importance. Despite such a central role in most fields of human activity and their ubiquitous presence in scientific research areas, yet a proper understanding of their eclectic behaviours and properties remains elusive. Granular materials can flow like liquids in some circumstances but they can act like solids in others. Their understanding requires the development of new paradigms and tools beyond the traditional domains of solid state physics, engineering and material sciences.

Aims

The aim of this initiative is to build an interdisciplinary community in Australia where a young generation of physicists, engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists, share a common language and complementary objectives. In this forum, studies and methodologies concerning the science of granular matter and other related complex materials such as foams, porous media and cellular solids, will be presented and discussed.

This is a field where new phenomena continue to be discovered and new knowledge continues to be advanced. The school will provide a productive and open environment for International and Australian leading scientists to present and debate cutting edge researches in the field of granular and complex materials.

Topics

  • Structure and stability of disordered matter
  • Stress and sound propagation in granular systems
  • Avalanches, earthquakes and critical phenomena
  • Flows of granular materials
  • Vibration, compaction and segregation phenomena in grain packs
  • Fluidized granular matter
  • Microcmechanics of granular and porous media
  • Fracture, fragmentation and fragility
  • Computer simulations of complex matter
  • Contact network and mechanical stability
  • Packing problems and assembly geometry
  • Statistical mechanics approaches
  • Continuous descriptions
  • Phase transitions

Important Dates

Deadline for abstract submission (workshop): May 26 – 2006.
Notification abstract acceptance (workshop): June 15 – 2006.
Registration Deadline: September 15 -2006.
Deadline For Accommodation Booking: October 1 -2006.

Venue

The conference Venue is in the Leonard Huxley Lecture Theatre in the Leonard Huxley Building on the ANU campus (building #56 at grid reference B4 on the campus map)

Maps

  • Australian National University campus - GIF (233kb) | JPEG (434kb)
  • Canberra city centre - PDF (198kb) | GIF (605kb) | JPEG (336kb)
  • Canberra region - GIF (596kb) | JPEG (179kb)