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We study the jamming transition in a model of elastic particles under shear at zero temperature, with a focus on the relaxation time τ₁. This relaxation time is from two-step simulations where the first step is the ordinary shearing simulation and the second step is the relaxation of the energy after stopping the shearing. τ₁ is determined from the final exponential decay of the energy. Such relaxations are done with many different starting configurations generated by a long shearing simulation in which the shear variable γ slowly increases. We study the correlations of both τ₁, determined from the decay, and the pressure, p₁, from the starting configurations as a function of the difference in γ. We find that the correlations of p₁ are longer lived than the ones of τ₁ and find that the reason for this is that the individual τ₁ is controlled both by p₁ of the starting configuration and a random contribution which depends on the relaxation path length - the average distance moved by the particles during the relaxation. We further conclude that it is γ_τ, determined from the correlations of τ₁, which is the relevant one when the aim is to generate data that may be used for determining the critical exponent that characterizes the jamming transition.

We do extensive simulations of a simple model of shear-driven jamming in two dimensions to determine and analyze the velocity distribution at different densities φ around the jamming density φ_J and at different low shear strain rates, γ˙. We then find that the velocity distribution is made up of two parts which are related to two different physical processes which we call the slow process and the fast process as they are dominated by the slower and the faster particles, respectively. Earlier scaling analyses have shown that the shear viscosity η, which diverges as the jamming density is approached from below, consists of two different terms, and we present strong evidence that these terms are related to the two different processes: the leading divergence is due to the fast process, whereas the correction-to-scaling term is due to the slow process. The analysis of the slow process is possible thanks to the observation that the velocity distribution for different γ˙ and φ at and around the shear-driven jamming transition has a peak at low velocities and that the distribution has a constant shape up to and slightly above this peak. We then find that it is possible to express the contribution to the shear viscosity due to the slow process in terms of height and position of the peak in the velocity distribution and find that this contribution matches the correction-to-scaling term, determined through a standard critical scaling analysis. A further observation is that the collective particle motion is dominated by the slow process. In contrast to the usual picture in critical phenomena with a direct link between the diverging correlation length and a diverging order parameter, we find that correlations and shear viscosity decouple since they are controlled by different sets of particles and that shear-driven jamming is thus an unusual kind of critical phenomenon.

We carry out overdamped simulations in a simple model of jamming - a collection of bidisperse soft core frictionless disks in two dimensions - with the aim to explore the finite size dependence of different quantities, both the relaxation time obtained from the relaxation of the energy and the pressure equivalent of the shear viscosity. The motivation for the paper is the observation [Nishikawa, J. Stat. Phys. 182, 37 (2021) 10.1007/s10955-021-02710-8] that there are finite size effects in the relaxation time, τ, that give problems in the determination of the critical divergence, and the claim that this is due to a finite size dependence, τ∼lnN, which makes τ an ill-defined quantity. Beside analyses to determine the relaxation time for the whole system we determine particle relaxation times which allow us to determine both histograms of particle relaxation times and the average particle relaxation times - two quantities that are very useful for the analyses. The starting configurations for the relaxation simulations are of two different kinds - completely random or taken from steady shearing simulations - and we find that the difference between these two cases are bigger than previously noted and that the observed problems in the determination of the critical divergence obtained when starting from random configurations are not present when instead starting the relaxations from shearing configurations. We also argue that the the effect that causes the lnN dependence is not as problematic as asserted. When it comes to the finite size dependence of the pressure equivalent of the shear viscosity we find that our data don't give support for the claimed strong finite size dependence, but also that the finite size dependence is at odds with what one would normally expect for a system with a diverging correlation length, and that this calls for an alternative understanding of the phenomenon of shear-driven jamming.

We carry out numerical simulations of athermally sheared, bidisperse, frictionless disks in two dimensions. From an appropriately defined velocity correlation function, we determine that there are two diverging length scales, xi and l, as the jamming transition is approached. We analyze our results using a critical scaling ansatz for the correlation function and argue that the more divergent length l is a consequence of a dangerous irrelevant scaling variable and that it is xi, which is the correlation length that determines the divergence of the system viscosity as jamming is approached from below in the liquid phase. We find that xi similar to (phi(J) - phi)(-v) diverges with the critical exponent v = 1. We provide evidence that xi measures the length scale of fluctuations in the rotation of the particle velocity field, while l measures the length scale of fluctuations in the divergence of the velocity field.

We study shear-driven jamming of ellipsoidal particles at zero temperature with a focus on the microscopic dynamics. We find that a change from spherical particles to ellipsoids with aspect ratio alpha = 1.02 gives dramatic changes of the microscopic dynamics with much lower translational velocities and a new role for the rotations. Whereas the velocity difference at contacts-and thereby the dissipation-in collections of spheres is dominated by the translational velocities and reduced by the rotations, the same quantity is in collections of ellipsoids instead totally dominated by the rotational velocities. By also examining the effect of different aspect ratios we find that the examined quantities show either a peak or a change in slope at alpha approximate to 1.2, which thus gives evidence for a crossover between different regions of low and high aspect ratio.

Collections of bidisperse frictionless particles at zero temperature in three dimensions are simulated with a shear-driven dynamics with the aim to compare with the behavior in two dimensions. Contrary to the prevailing picture, and in contrast to results from isotropic jamming from compression or quench, we find that the critical exponents in three dimensions are different from those in two dimensions and conclude that shear-driven jamming in two and three dimensions belong to different universality classes.

We numerically simulate the uniform athermal shearing of bidisperse, frictionless, two-dimensional spherocylinders and three-dimensional prolate ellipsoids. We focus on the orientational ordering of particles as an asphericity parameter α → 0 and particles approach spherical. We find that the nematic order parameter S₂ is nonmonotonic in the packing fraction ϕ and that, as α → 0, S₂ stays finite at jamming and above. The approach to spherical particles thus appears to be singular. We also find that sheared particles continue to rotate above jamming and that particle contacts preferentially lie along the narrowest width of the particles, even as α → 0.

We carry out constant volume simulations of steady-state, shear-driven flow in a simple model of athermal, bidisperse, soft-core, frictionless disks in two dimensions, using a dissipation law that gives rise to Bagnoldian rheology. Focusing on the small strain rate limit, we map out the rheological behavior as a function of particle packing fraction phi and a parameter Q that measures the elasticity of binary particle collisions. We find a Q*(phi) that marks the clear crossover from a region characteristic of strongly inelastic collisions, Q < Q*, to a region characteristic of weakly inelastic collisions, Q > Q*, and give evidence that Q*(phi) diverges as phi -> phi(J), the shear-driven jamming transition. We thus conclude that the jamming transition at any value of Q behaves the same as the strongly inelastic case, provided one is sufficiently close to fJ. We further characterize the differing nature of collisions in the strongly inelastic vs weakly inelastic regions, and recast our results into the constitutive equation form commonly used in discussions of hard granular matter.

We report on numerical simulations of simple models of athermal, bidisperse, soft-core, massive disks in two dimensions, as a function of packing fraction phi, inelasticity of collisions as measured by a parameter Q, and applied uniform shear strain rate (gamma) over dot. Our particles have contact interactions consisting of normally directed elastic repulsion and viscous dissipation, as well as tangentially directed viscous dissipation, but no interparticle Coulombic friction. Mapping the phase diagram in the (phi, Q) plane for small (gamma) over dot, we find a sharp first-order rheological phase transition from a region with Bagnoldian rheology to a region with Newtonian rheology, and show that the system is always Newtonian at jamming. We consider the rotational motion of particles and demonstrate the crucial importance that the coupling between rotational and translational degrees of freedom has on the phase structure at small Q (strongly inelastic collisions). At small Q, we show that, upon increasing (gamma) over dot, the sharp Bagnoldian-to-Newtonian transition becomes a coexistence region of finite width in the (phi,(gamma) over dot) plane, with coexisting Bagnoldian and Newtonian shear bands. Crossing this coexistence region by increasing (gamma) over dot at fixed phi, we find that discontinuous shear thickening can result if (gamma) over dot is varied too rapidly for the system to relax to the shear-banded steady state corresponding to the instantaneous value of (gamma) over dot.

We carry out constant volume simulations of steady-state shear-driven rheology in a simple model of bidisperse soft-core frictionless disks in two dimensions, using a dissipation law that gives rise to Bagnoldian rheology. We discuss in detail the critical scaling ansatz for the shear-driven jamming transition and carry out a detailed scaling analysis of our resulting data for pressure p and shear stress sigma. Our analysis determines the critical exponent beta that describes the algebraic divergence of the Bagnold transport coefficients lim((gamma) over dot -> 0) p/(gamma) over dot(2), sigma/(gamma) over dot(2) similar to (phi(J) -phi)(-beta) as the jamming transition phi(J) is approached from below. For the low strain rates considered in this work, we show that it is still necessary to consider the leading correction-to-scaling term in order to achieve a self-consistent analysis of our data, in which the critical parameters become independent of the size of the window of data used in the analysis. We compare our resulting value beta approximate to 5.0 +/- 0.4 against previous numerical results and competing theoretical models. Our results confirm that the shear-driven jamming transition in Bagnoldian systems is well described by a critical scaling theory and we relate this scaling theory to the phenomenological constituent laws for dilatancy and friction.