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Soft-Sphere Packings at Finite Pressure but Unstable to Shear

Simon Dagois-Bohy, Brian P. Tighe, Johannes Simon, Silke Henkes, and Martin van Hecke
Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 095703 – Published 27 August 2012
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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 G. For these packings, the scaling of the average of G is consistent with earlier results, while the probability distribution P(G) exhibits novel and rich scalings.

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  • Received 15 March 2012

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.095703

© 2012 American Physical Society

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Getting into a Proper Jam

Published 27 August 2012

Numerical simulations are revealing general properties of jammed states of matter.

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Authors & Affiliations

Simon Dagois-Bohy1,2, Brian P. Tighe2,3, Johannes Simon1, Silke Henkes2,4, and Martin van Hecke1

  • 1Kamerling Onnes Lab, Universiteit Leiden, Postbus 9504, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
  • 2Instituut-Lorentz, Universiteit Leiden, Postbus 9506, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
  • 3Delft University of Technology, Process & Energy Laboratory, Leeghwaterstraat 44 2628 CA Delft, The Netherlands
  • 4Physics Department, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244, USA

See Also

Finite-Size Scaling at the Jamming Transition

Carl P. Goodrich, Andrea J. Liu, and Sidney R. Nagel
Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 095704 (2012)

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Vol. 109, Iss. 9 — 31 August 2012

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