The Hydra String Method: A Novel Means to Explore Potential Energy Surfaces and its Application to Granular Materials

I will discuss an entirely different approach to understanding the complex behavior of granular materials, built on a novel method to find ensembles of pathways between stable packings of the system. This Hydra String Method is an efficient and autonomous way to trawl any potential energy surface to enumerate the saddles, minima, and form a network representation of the connections between them. I apply the Hydra String Method to bi-disperse configurations of frictionless soft spheres, with the future aim to use the ensembles of pathways to statistically predict the dynamics of a sheared system.