Excited to present “Shear-thickening in dense suspensions: Beyond mean-field models and steady-state response” at the @cornellupress.bsky.social Soft Matter Seminar Series. Honored to be listed among researchers I’ve long admired and learned so much from. #everythingflows #networksrcool

FINAL REVEAL: Viscosity collapses beautifully when plotted against the number of 3rd-order loops.
This collapse is universal — independent of stress, volume fraction, or even friction. We even find a power law behavior, signifying max. n3 at jamming.

This is where things got interesting: The mean-field golden standard models suggest viscosity to be driven by the frictional number of contacts. To test this, we performed extensive simulations changing packing fraction, stress, and sliding friction.
Spoiler: NO collapse

Earlier work hinted that DST onset ≈ loop formation.
Here, we visualized them directly. Sure enough, loops first appear right as suspensions undergo DST. We tracked how 3rd–8th order loops evolve with stress, packing fraction, and friction.

To answer the question: "What is the motif that underpins the DST transition?"
Enters network science: We disentangled our frictional network into 1) isolated edges, 2) Connected edges, and 3) closed cycles, aka loops (3-8).

It is established that DST manifests itself as a stress-activated transition from an unconstrained to a constrained state, leading to the formation of the frictional contact network. Now the question we had was “How about the topology/motif of this network that underpins DST?”