Granular Flow and Rigidity - From the Lab to the Solar System

Explore the fascinating physics of granular materials and their behavior across scales from laboratory experiments to planetary systems in this conference talk. Discover how Earth materials like soil, mud, ice, and rocks exist in a complex state between solid and fluid, exhibiting behaviors such as glassy dynamics, strain localization, memory encoding in microstructure, and complex yielding patterns. Learn about the novel challenges presented by the mixtures, excitations, geometries, and scales associated with soft Earth problems, and understand how frontiers in geophysics intersect with soft matter physics. Examine recent research demonstrating the connections between these fields and how their combination leads to advances and insights in both domains. Gain insights into open questions and challenges in the field, including problems related to landslides, earthquakes, erosion, glaciers, and exotic transport phenomena of earth materials, presented as part of a conference bringing together researchers from theory, simulation, experimental approaches, and geophysical field observations.