Force networks and jamming in shear-deformed sphere packings

HA Vinutha and S Sastry, PHYSICAL REVIEW E, 99, 012123 (2019).

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.99.012123

The emergence of rigidity upon changes of temperature, density, or applied stresses in disordered assemblies of particles is of interest in a wide range of soft matter, from glass formers, gels, foams, and granular matter. Shear jamming of frictional grains presents an interesting special case wherein the application of shear stress leads to rigidity rather than its loss. The formation of self-organized structures that resist shear deformation offers an appealing geometric picture of shear jamming, which nevertheless is incompletely developed, and not well integrated with ideas concerning rigidity in frictionless systems. Exploiting the observation that athermally sheared sphere assemblies develop structural features necessary for shear jamming even in the absence of friction H. A. Vinutha and S. Sastry, Nature Physics 12, 578 (2016), we analyze conditions for jamming in such assemblies computationally. Solving force and torque balance conditions for their contact geometry, we show, and validate with frictional simulations, that the mean contact number Z equals D + 1 (for spatial dimension D = 2, 3) at jamming for both finite and infinite friction, above the "random loose packing" limit density, at variance with previous analyses of frictional jamming. We show that the shear jamming threshold satisfies the marginal stability condition recently proposed for jamming in frictionless systems. Along lines explored in studying covalent glasses, we perform rigidity percolation analysis for D = 2 and find that rigidity percolation precedes shear jamming, which, however, coincides with the percolation of over-constrained regions, leading to the identification of a regime analogous to the intermediate phase observed in covalent glasses. Together, these results provide a geometric description of shear jamming that relate closely with analyses of jamming, rigidity, and the glass transition in frictionless systems, and thus help develop a unified description of jamming phenomenology in diverse disordered matter.

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