Umeå University's logo

The jamming of bidisperse soft core disks is considered, using a variety of different protocols to produce the jammed state. In agreement with other works, we find that cooling and compression can lead to a broad range of jamming packing fractions ϕ_J, depending on cooling rate and initial configuration; the larger the degree of big particle clustering in the initial configuration, the larger will be the value of ϕ_J. In contrast, we find that shearing disrupts particle clustering, leading to a much narrower range of ϕ_J as the shear strain rate varies. In the limit of vanishingly small shear strain rate, we find a unique nontrivial value for the jamming density that is independent of the initial system configuration. We conclude that shear driven jamming is a unique and well-defined critical point in the space of shear driven steady states. We clarify the relation between glassy behavior, rigidity, and jamming in such systems and relate our results to recent experiments.

We carry out a finite-size scaling analysis of the jamming transition in frictionless bidisperse soft core disks in two dimensions. We consider two different jamming protocols: (i) quench from random initial positions and (ii) quasistatic shearing. By considering the fraction of jammed states as a function of packing fraction for systems with different numbers of particles, we determine the spatial correlation length critical exponent ν≈1 and show that corrections to scaling are crucial for analyzing the data. We show that earlier numerical results yielding ν<1 are due to the improper neglect of these corrections.

We numerically study the distributions of global pressure that are found in ensembles of statically jammed and quasistatically sheared systems of bidisperse, frictionless disks at fixed packing fraction phi in two dimensions. We use these distributions to address the question of how pressure increases as phi increases above the jamming point phi(J), p similar to |phi - phi(J) |(y). For statically jammed ensembles, our results are consistent with the exponent y being simply related to the power law of the interparticle soft-core interaction. For sheared systems, however, the value of y is consistent with a nontrivial value, as found previously in rheological simulations.

We use numerical simulations to investigate the effect that different models of energy dissipation have on the rheology of soft-core frictionless disks, below jamming in two dimensions. We find that it is not necessarily the mass of the particles that determines whether a system has Bagnoldian or Newtonian rheology, but rather the presence or absence of large connected clusters of particles. We demonstrate the key role that tangential dissipation plays in the formation of such clusters and in several models find a transition from Bagnoldian to Newtonian rheology as the packing fraction. is varied. For each model, we show that appropriately scaled rheology curves approach a well defined limit as the mass of the particles decreases and collisions become strongly inelastic.

We investigate the criticality of the jamming transition for overdamped shear-driven frictionless disks in two dimensions for two different models of energy dissipation: (i) Durian’s bubble model with dissipation proportional to the velocity difference of particles in contact, and (ii) Durian’s “mean-field” approximation to (i), with dissipation due to the velocity difference between the particle and the average uniform shear flow velocity. By considering the finite-size behavior of pressure, the pressure analog of viscosity, and the macroscopic friction σ/p  , we argue that these two models share the same critical behavior.