The stretching and break-up of tectonic plates by rifting control the evolution of continents and oceans, but the processes by which lithosphere deforms and accommodates strain during rifting remain enigmatic. Using scattering of teleseismic shear waves beneath rifted zones and adjacent areas in Southern California, we resolve the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary and lithospheric thickness va...

A hexagonal columnar crystal undergoes a shear-melting transition above a critical shear rate or stress. We combine the analysis of the shear-thinning regime below the melting with that of synchrotron x-ray scattering data under shear and propose the melting to be due to a proliferation of dislocations, whose density is determined by both techniques to vary as a power law of the shear rate with...

The rheology of solvent-filled polymer brushes under steady and oscillatory shear is studied by Brownian dynamics simulation. The flow field is solved self-consistently with the polymer dynamics. We find that under steady flow the brushes are shear thinning in both normal forces and shear viscosity. During oscillatory flow, extreme shear thickening occurs when the ratio of the Weissenberg numbe...

Lattice Boltzmann simulations are used to explore the behavior of liquid crystals subject to Poiseuille flow. In the nematic regime at low shear rates we find two possible steady state configurations of the director field. The selected state depends on both the shear rate and the history of the sample. For both director configurations there is clear evidence of shear-thinning, a decrease in the...

Lift forces on a cylindrical particle in plane Poiseuille flow of shear thinning fluids are investigated by direct numerical simulation. Previous works on this topic for Newtonian fluids show that the two-dimensional channel can be divided into alternating regions defined by the stability of the particle’s equilibrium. We observe stability regions with the same pattern in flows of shear thinnin...