Webinar - SCM
What causes a transition from Static to Dynamic Friction?
Speaker: Harish Charan (Durham University, Durham, UK)
Raman Research Institute
Bangalore
Webinar
Title: What causes a transition from Static to Dynamic Friction?
Speaker: Harish Charan
Date & Time: Thursday, 26 June 2025, 11:00 am
Venue: Auditorium
Abstract: The transition from static to dynamical friction is an age-old problem that intrigued already the ancient Greeks. Explicitly, Themistius stated in 350 A.D. that "it is easier to further the motion of a moving body than to move a body at rest". The phenomenon is central to many different fields of physics and material science including tribology, the performance of microelectromechanical systems, mechanics of fracture, and earthquakes. Despite the considerable amount of work in the modern era starting with Leonardo, Amonton, and Coulomb, and culminating with enlightening experiments and simulations in recent years, the actual instability mechanism that results in this transition is still debated. In this talk, I would like to answer this question by incorporating analytic and computational methods employing an array of frictional disks.
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85752867217?pwd=elpGip5sbIlsXfVNbKWdEdzv52kTxE.1
Meeting ID: 857 5286 7217
Passcode: 034965
Brief Bio of the speaker : Dr. Harish Charan is a computational and theoretical physicist whose research focuses on disordered solids, dusty plasmas, and soft polymeric materials. He is currently based at Durham University, UK, where he develops theoretical models and large-scale simulation tools to investigate how collective behaviour emerges in disordered and driven systems. He is the lead developer of Lamina, an open-source, modular molecular dynamics code designed to study hybrid elastic networks and inter-facial phenomena.
Dr. Charan was born and raised in Pokhran, Jaisalmer (India). He earned his BSc in Physics from S.B.K. Government College, Jaisalmer, followed by an MSc from the IIT0 Kharagpur. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, before joining Durham University for his current position. His research has been recognised through several awards, including the FGS Prize for Outstanding Postdoctoral Research at Weizmann (2022), the DST Young Scientist Travel Award (2016), and the Laidlaw Research and Leadership Grant at UK (2024). Beyond research, he is actively involved in science outreach through the WISMO initiative, mentors’ students at Durham, and advocates for open science via public code releases and technical blogging.