ABSTRACT
The original version of this Article contained an error in second sentence of the Acknowledgements, which incorrectly read 'J.Y. and P.G.K. also acknowledge support from US-ARO (W911NF-15-1-0604) and US-AFOSR (FA9550-17-1-011), and P.G.K. also gratefully acknowledges support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation via the Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program.' The correct version states 'US-AFOSR (FA9550-17-1-0114)' in place of 'US-AFOSR (FA9550-17-1-011)'. This has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.
ABSTRACT
Energy transport properties in heterogeneous materials have attracted scientific interest for more than half of a century, and they continue to offer fundamental and rich questions. One of the outstanding challenges is to extend Anderson theory for uncorrelated and fully disordered lattices in condensed-matter systems to physical settings in which additional effects compete with disorder. Here we present the first systematic experimental study of energy transport and localization properties in simultaneously disordered and nonlinear granular crystals. In line with prior theoretical studies, we observe in our experiments that disorder and nonlinearity-which individually favor energy localization-can effectively cancel each other out, resulting in the destruction of wave localization. We also show that the combined effect of disorder and nonlinearity can enable manipulation of energy transport speed in granular crystals. Specifically, we experimentally demonstrate superdiffusive transport. Furthermore, our numerical computations suggest that subdiffusive transport should be attainable by controlling the strength of the system's external precompression force.