Congrats to Ephraim Bililign ’17 for his recent paper being the subject of an APS Physics Synopsis — and for introducing a new work “keramicity” into the the granular materials lingo. In the course of his research, Ephraim uncovered the importance of a temperature-like variable associated with the ways forces are required to balance under Newton’s Laws. Since these forces can be drawn as tiles in a reciprocal space, the name “keramicity” was born!
You can read a summary of our results in this article by Philip Ball in Nature Materials.