Abstract
Any child playing on the beach knows that the physical properties of wet and dry sand are very different. Wet sand can be used to build sharp-featured sandcastles that would be unstable in dry sand. We have now quantified the effect of adding small quantities of liquid to a granular medium. Nanometre-scale layers of liquid on millimetre-scale grains dramatically increase the repose angle (the steepest stable slope that the substance can form) and allow the development of long-range correlations, or clumps.
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Hornbaker, D., Albert, R., Albert, I. et al. What keeps sandcastles standing?. Nature 387, 765 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/42831
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/42831
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