Compact travelling waves in viscoelastic solids

Crack propagation in viscoelastic solids.

We study crack propagation in a viscoelastic solid. Using simple arguments, we derive equations for the velocity dependence of the crack-tip radius, a (v) , and for the energy per unit area to propagate the crack, G (v) . For a viscoelastic modulus E (omega) which increases as omega(1-s) (0< s< 1) in the transition region between the rubbery region and the glassy region, we find that a (v) appr...

Lubrication of soft viscoelastic solids

Lubrication flows appear in many applications in engineering, biophysics, and in nature. Separation of surfaces and minimisation of friction and wear is achieved when the lubrication fluid builds up a lift force. In this paper we analyse soft lubricated contacts by treating the solid walls as viscoelastic: soft materials are typically not purely elastic, but dissipate energy under dynamical loa...

Travelling waves in multivortex configurations

We investigate zero modes of a multivortex background which are due to the energetic degeneracy of the planar static n-vortex solution in Bogomol’nyi limit of the Abelian Higgs model parametrised by a set of 2n real parameters. The zero modes take the form of waves travelling with a speed of light independently along each of the vortices irrespectively to their mutual separations. String descri...

Synaptic travelling waves

An important goal of neuroscience is to establish a series of direct links between the abstract nature of biophysical model equations and their interpretation in terms of experimental findings in biological neural networks. I propose to address this issue by developing a novel mathematical analysis of the dynamics of synaptically interacting neural systems and by establishing a framework for co...

Stability of Travelling Waves