Final Activity and Management Report Summary - PATFORM (Pattern formation induced by elastic stresses and geometrical constraints)
Most of the work over the last three years has concerned the dynamical instabilities in fracture and the folding of elastic objects. Recently, we have also started to work on anomalous diffusion and the packing of hard spheres. These problems have common elements such as the role of disorder, of the geometry and of the resulting frustration. These three elements give rise to an interesting coupling between geometry and dynamics. For each class of problems, the essentials of the physical questions have been distilled, to build new models and to solve them.