Publications by Thomas Willem Jan de Geus

Investigating Criticality in Rock Failure Using Fiber-Optic Strain Sensing

Gradual localization of deformation preceding catastrophic failure can produce precursory signals associated with a phase transition that may be present prior to earthquakes. However, due to the unclear origin of these precursors and the complexity of the ...

2025

Dynamical heterogeneities of thermal creep in pinned interfaces

Matthieu Wyart, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus

Disordered systems under applied loading display slow creep flows at finite temperature. Renormalization group arguments predicted that creep proceeds via thermal avalanches of activated events. Recently, thermal avalanches were argued to control the dynam ...

2025

Armouring of a Frictional Interface by Mechanical Noise

Matthieu Wyart, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus

A dry frictional interface loaded in shear often displays stick–slip. The amplitude of this cycle depends on the probability that a microscopic event nucleates a rupture and on the rate at which microscopic events are triggered. The latter is determined by ...

2024

Scaling theory for the statistics of slip at frictional interfaces

Matthieu Wyart, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus

Slip at a frictional interface occurs via intermittent events. Understanding how these events are nucleated, can propagate, or stop spontaneously remains a challenge, central to earthquake science and tribology. In the absence of disorder, rate-and-state a ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2022

Scaling Description of Creep Flow in Amorphous Solids

Matthieu Wyart, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus, Wencheng Ji, Marko Popovic

Amorphous solids such as coffee foam, toothpaste, or mayonnaise display a transient creep flow when a stress E is suddenly imposed. The associated strain rate is commonly found to decay in time as gamma_ -t-nu, followed either by arrest or by a sudden flui ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2022

Mean-field description for the architecture of low-energy excitations in glasses

Matthieu Wyart, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus, Elisabeth Agoritsas, Wencheng Ji

In amorphous materials, groups of particles can rearrange locally into a new stable configuration. Such elementary excitations are key as they determine the response to external stresses, as well as to thermal and quantum fluctuations. Yet, understanding w ...

2022

Thermally activated flow in models of amorphous solids

Matthieu Wyart, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus, Wencheng Ji, Marko Popovic

Amorphous solids yield at a critical value Sigma(c) of the imposed stress Sigma through a dynamical phase transition. While sharp in athermal systems, the presence of thermal fluctuations leads to the rounding of the transition and thermally activated flow ...

AMER PHYSICAL SOC2021

Improving the initial guess for the Newton-Raphson protocol in time-dependent simulations

Thomas Willem Jan de Geus

ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE2020

Thermal origin of quasilocalized excitations in glasses

Matthieu Wyart, Thomas Willem Jan de Geus, Elisabeth Agoritsas, Wencheng Ji, Marko Popovic

Key aspects of glasses are controlled by the presence of excitations in which a group of particles can rearrange. Surprisingly, recent observations indicate that their density is dramatically reduced and their size decreases as the temperature of the super ...

2020

Energy-based comparison between the Fourier-Galerkin method and the finite element method

Thomas Willem Jan de Geus

The Fourier-Galerkin method (in short FFTH) has gained popularity in numerical homogenisation because it can treat problems with a huge number of degrees of freedom. Because the method incorporates the fast Fourier transform (FFT) in the linear solver, it ...

ELSEVIER2020