Abstract
When are athermal soft-sphere packings jammed? Any experimentally relevant definition must, at the very least, require a jammed packing to resist shear. We demonstrate that widely used (numerical) protocols, in which particles are compressed together, can and do produce packings that are unstable to shear—and that the probability of generating such packings reaches one near jamming. We introduce a new protocol which, by allowing the system to explore different box shapes as it equilibrates, generates truly jammed packings with strictly positive shear moduli . For these packings, the scaling of the average of is consistent with earlier results, while the probability distribution exhibits novel and rich scalings.
- Received 15 March 2012
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.095703
© 2012 American Physical Society
Viewpoint
Getting into a Proper Jam
Published 27 August 2012
Numerical simulations are revealing general properties of jammed states of matter.
See more in Physics