https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202124915004
Patterns formed by chains of magnetic beads
1
Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Campus do Pici, 60455-760 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil
2
PMMH, ESPCI, CNRS UMR 7636, 7 quai St. Bernard, 75005 Paris, France
* e-mail: daniloborges@fisica.ufc.br
** e-mail: hans@fisica.ufc.br
*** e-mail: carmona@fisica.ufc.br
**** e-mail: soares@fisica.ufc.br
† e-mail: ascanio@fisica.ufc.br
Published online: 7 June 2021
Magnetic beads attract each other forming rather stable chains. We consider such chains formed by magnetic beads and push them into a Hele-Shaw cell either from the boundary or from the center. When such a chain is pushed into a cavity, it bends and folds spontaneously forming interesting unreported patterns. These patterns are self-similar and an effective fractal dimension can be defined. As found experimentally and with numerical simulations, the numbers of beads, loops and contacts follow power laws as a function of packing fraction and, depending on the injection procedure, even energetically less favorable triangular configurations can be stabilized.
A video is available at https://doi.org/10.48448/e18b-6663
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
