We comprehensively study mechanical and vibrational properties of dimer packings in three-dimensional space with particular attention on critical scaling behaviors near the jamming transition. First, we confirm the dependence of the packing fraction at the transition on the aspect ratio, the isostatic contact number at the transition, and the scaling dependence of the excess contact number on the excess density. Second, we study the elastic moduli, bulk and shear moduli, and establish power-law scaling of them. Finally, we study the vibrational density of states and its characteristic frequency. The vibrational density of states shows two plateaus in the lower- and higher-frequency regions, which are characterized by rotational and translational vibrational modes, respectively. The onset frequency of the lower-frequency plateau scales linearly to the square root of excess density. The scaling laws in the mechanical and vibrational properties are consistent between two- and three-dimensional dimers, and they are identical to those in spheres.
The unconventional thermal properties of jammed amorphous solids are directly related to their density of vibrational states. While the vibrational spectrum of jammed soft sphere solids has been fully described, the vibrational spectrum of hard spheres, a model for colloidal glasses, is still unknown due to the difficulty of treating the non-analytic interaction potential. We bypass this difficulty using the recently described effective interaction potential for the free energy of thermal hard spheres. By minimizing this effective free energy we mimic a quench and produce typical configuration…
Jammed particulate systems composed of various shapes of particles undergo the jamming transition as they are compressed or decompressed. To date, sphere packings have been extensively studied in many previous works, where isostaticity at the transition and scaling laws with the pressure of various quantities, including the contact number and the vibrational density of states, have been established. Additionally, much attention has been paid to nonspherical packings, and particularly recent work has made progress in understanding ellipsoidal packings. In the present work, we study the dimer pa…
Amorphous solids tend to present an abundance of soft elastic modes, which diminish their transport properties, generate heterogeneities in their elastic response, and affect non-linear processes like thermal activation of plasticity. This is especially true in packings of particles near their jamming transition, for which effective medium theory and variational arguments can both predict the density of vibrational modes. However, recent numerics support that one hypothesis of the variational argument does not hold. We provide a novel variational argument which overcomes this problem, and corr…
We perform numerical simulations of the jamming transition of non-spherical particles in two dimensions. In particular, we systematically investigate how the physical quantities at the jamming transition point behave when the shapes of the particle deviate slightly from the perfect disks. For efficient numerical simulation, we first derive an analytical expression of the gap function, using the perturbation theory around the reference disks. Starting from disks, we observe the effects of the deformation of the shapes of particles by the $n$-th order term of the Fourier series $\sin(nθ)$. We sh…
We compare the structural and mechanical properties of static packings composed of frictionless convex (ellipses) and concave (rigid dimers) particles in two dimensions. We employ numerical simulations to generate static packings and measure the shear stress in response to applied simple shear strain as a function of the aspect ratio and amount of compression. We find that the behavior near jamming is significantly different for ellipses and dimers even though both shapes are roughly characterized by the aspect ratio and possess the same number of translational and rotational degrees of freedo…
We show using numerical simulations that vortices in honeycomb pinning arrays can exhibit a remarkable variety of dynamical phases that are distinct from those found for triangular and square pinning arrays. In the honeycomb arrays, it is possible for the interstitial vortices to form dimer or higher n-mer states which have an additional orientational degree of freedom that can lead to the formation of vortex molecular crystals. For filling fractions where dimer states appear, a novel dynamical symmetry breaking can occur when the dimers flow in one of two possible alignment directions. This l…
We show that non-Brownian suspensions of repulsive spheres below jamming display a slow relaxational dynamics with a characteristic time scale that diverges at jamming. This slow time scale is fully encoded in the structure of the unjammed packing and can be readily measured via the vibrational density of states. We show that the corresponding dynamic critical exponent is the same for randomly generated and sheared packings. Our results show that a wide variety of physical situations, from suspension rheology to algorithmic studies of the jamming transition are controlled by a unique diverging…
We study the localization of vibrational modes of frictionless granular media. We introduce a new method, motivated by earlier work on non-Hermitian quantum problems, which works well both in the localized regime where the localization length $ξ$ is much less than the linear size $L$ and in the regime $ξ$ grater or of order $L$ when modes are extended throughout our finite system. Our very lowest frequency modes show "quasi-localized" resonances away from the jamming point; the spatial extent of these regions increases as the jamming point is approached, as expected theoretically. Throughout t…
Studying the jamming transition of granular and colloidal systems, has lead to a proliferation of theoretical and numerical results formulated in the language of the eigenspectrum of the dynamical matrix for these disordered system. Only recently however, these modes have been accessed experimentally in colloidal and granular media, computing the eigenmodes of the covariance matrix of the particle positions. At the same time new conceptual and methodological questions have appeared, regarding the interpretation of these results. In the present paper, we first give an overview of the theoretica…
An active system consisting of many self-spinning dimers is simulated, and a distinct local rotational jamming transition is observed as the density increases. In the low density regime, the system stays in an absorbing state, in which each dimer rotates independently subject to the applied torque. While in the high density regime, a fraction of the dimers become rotationally jammed into local clusters, and the system exhibits spinodal-decomposition like two-phase morphologies. For high enough densities, the system becomes completely jammed in both rotational and translational degrees of freed…
We determine the form of the complex shear modulus $G^*$ in soft sphere packings near jamming. Viscoelastic response at finite frequency is closely tied to a packing's intrinsic relaxational modes, which are distinct from the vibrational modes of undamped packings. We demonstrate and explain the appearance of an anomalous excess of slowly relaxing modes near jamming, reflected in a diverging relaxational density of states. From the density of states, we derive the dependence of $G^*$ on frequency and distance to the jamming transition, which is confirmed by numerics.
A theory for the microscopic structure and the vibrational properties of soft sphere glass at finite temperature is presented. With an effective potential, derived here, the phase diagram and vibrational properties are worked out around the Maxwell critical point at zero temperature $T$ and pressure $p$. Variational arguments and effective medium theory identically predict a non-trivial temperature scale $T^*\sim p^{(2-a)/(1-a)}$ with $a \approx 0.17$ such that low-energy vibrational properties are hard-sphere like for $T \gtrsim T^*$, and zero-temperature soft-sphere like otherwise. However, …
Infrared spectroscopy (IR) and quantum chemistry calculations that are based on the density functional theory (DFT) have been used to study the structure, molecular interactions of the nematic and twist-bend phases for thioether-linked dimers. Infrared absorbance measurements were conducted in a polarized beam for a homogeneously aligned sample in order to obtain more details about the orientation of the vibrational transition dipole moments. The distributions to investigate the structure and conformation of the molecule dihedral angle were calculated. The calculated spectrum was compared with…
Jamming is a fundamental transition that governs the mechanical behavior of particulate media, including sand, foam and dense suspensions but also biological tissues: Upon compression, particulate media can change from freely flowing to a disordered solid. Jamming has previously been conceived as a bulk phenomenon involving particle motions in fixed geometries. In a diverse class of soft materials, however, solidification can take place in a deformable geometry, such as on the surface of a fluid droplet or in the formation of a bijel. In these systems the nature and dynamics of jamming remains…
We numerically investigate stress relaxation in soft athermal disks to reveal critical slowing down when the system approaches the jamming point. The exponents describing the divergence of the relaxation time differ dramatically depending on whether the transition is approached from the jammed or unjammed phase. This contrasts sharply with conventional dynamic critical scaling scenarios, where a single exponent characterizes both sides. We explain this surprising difference in terms of the vibrational density of states (vDOS), which is a key ingredient of linear viscoelastic theory. The vDOS e…
We consider a system of hard spheres close to jamming, where translation invariance is broken by pinning a randomly chosen set of particles. Using two different protocols, we generate two kinds of packings at the jamming point, isostatic and hyperstatic packings. In the case where the packings are isostatic, jamming transition is not affected by random pinning: the jamming density is only slightly reduced, a generalized isostaticity condition holds, the system is marginally rigid over the entire glass phase, and the typical structural signatures of jamming are unchanged. Besides, random pinnin…
We discuss the physics of crystals with small polydispersity near the jamming transition point. For this purpose, we introduce an effective single-particle model taking into account the nearest neighbor structure of crystals. The model can be solved analytically by using the replica method in the limit of large dimensions. In the absence of polydispersity, the replica symmetric solution is stable until the jamming transition point, which leads to the standard scaling of perfect crystals. On the contrary, for finite polydispersity, the model undergoes the full replica symmetry breaking (RSB) tr…
We report on the critical properties of minimaly-polydisperse crystals, hexagonal in 2d and face-centered cubic in 3 dimensions, at the isostatic jamming point. The force and gap distributions display power-law tails for small values. The vibrational density of states (VDOS) is flat. The scaling behavior of forces of extended floppy modes and the VDOS are universal and in agreement with an infinite-dimensional mean-field theory and maximally amorphous packings down to 2 dimensions. The distributions of gaps and forces of localized floppy modes of near-crystals appear non-universal. A small fra…
We report an analytical study of the vibrational spectrum of the simplest model of jamming, the soft perceptron. We identify two distinct classes of soft modes. The first kind of modes are related to isostaticity and appear only in the close vicinity of the jamming transition. The second kind of modes instead are present everywhere in the glass phase and are related to the hierarchical structure of the potential energy landscape. Our results highlight the universality of the spectrum of normal modes in disordered systems, and open the way towards a detailed analytical understanding of the vibr…
Vibrational properties of inclusion complexes with cyclodextrins are studied by means of Raman spectroscopy and numerical simulation. In particular, Raman spectra of the non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drug indomethacin undergo notable changes in the energy range between 1600 and 1700 cm$^{-1}$ when inclusion complexes with cyclodextrins are formed. By using both \emph{ab initio} quantum chemical calculations and molecular dynamics, we studied how to relate such changes to the geometry of the inclusion process, disentangling single-molecule effects, from changes in the solid state structure o…
We demonstrate the existence of high--order jamming crossovers in systems of particles with repulsive contact interactions, which originate from the collapse of successive coordination shells. At zero temperature, these crossovers induce an anomalous behavior of the bulk modulus, which varies non--monotonically with the density, while at finite temperature they induce density anomalies consisting in an increased diffusivity upon isothermal compression and in a negative thermal expansion coefficient. We rationalize the dependence of these crossovers on the softness of the interaction potential,…
During the jamming of thermal colloids, the first peak of the pair distribution function shows a maximum height $g_1^{\rm max}$. We find that $g_1^{\rm max}$ is accompanied by significant change of material properties and thus signifies the transition from unjammed to jammed glasses. The scaling laws at $g_1^{\rm max}$ lead to scaling collapse of structural and thermodynamic quantities, indicating the criticality of the T=0 jamming transition. The physical significance of $g_1^{\rm max}$ is highlighted by its coincidence with the equality of the kinetic and potential energy and the maximum flu…
We propose a `phase diagram' for particulate systems that interact via purely repulsive contact forces, such as granular media and colloidal suspensions. We identify and characterize two distinct classes of behavior as a function of the input kinetic energy per degree of freedom $T_0$ and packing fraction deviation above and below jamming onset $Δϕ=ϕ- ϕ_J$ using numerical simulations of purely repulsive frictionless disks. Iso-coordinated solids (ICS) only occur above jamming for $Δϕ> Δϕ_c(T_0)$; they possess average coordination number equal to the isostatic value ($< z> = z_{\rm iso}$) requi…
We use molecular simulations to study jamming of a crumpled bead-spring model polymer in a finite container and compare to jamming of repulsive spheres. After proper constraint counting, the onset of rigidity is seen to occur isostatically as in the case of repulsive spheres. Despite this commonality, the presence of the curved container wall and polymer backbone bonds introduce new mechanical properties. Notably, these include additional bands in the vibrational density of states that reflect the material structure as well as oscillations in local contact number and density near the wall but …
Amorphous packings of frictionless, spherical particles are isostatic at jamming onset, with the number of constraints (contacts) equal to the number of degrees of freedom. Their structural and mechanical properties are controlled by the interparticle contact network. In contrast, amorphous packings of frictional particles are typically hyperstatic at jamming onset. We perform extensive numerical simulations in two dimensions of the geometrical asperity (GA) model for static friction, to further investigate the role of isostaticity. In the GA model, interparticle forces are obtained by summing…
Amorphous packings of non-spherical particles such as ellipsoids and spherocylinders are known to be hypostatic: the number of mechanical contacts between particles is smaller than the number of degrees of freedom, thus violating Maxwell's mechanical stability criterion. In this work, we propose a general theory of hypostatic amorphous packings and the associated jamming transition. First, we show that many systems fall into a same universality class. As an example, we explicitly map ellipsoids into a system of `breathing' particles. We show by using a marginal stability argument that in both …
We conduct experiments on two-dimensional packings of colloidal thermosensitive hydrogel particles whose packing fraction can be tuned above the jamming transition by varying the temperature. By measuring displacement correlations between particles, we extract the vibrational properties of a corresponding "shadow" system with the same configuration and interactions, but for which the dynamics of the particles are undamped. The vibrational spectrum and the nature of the modes are very similar to those predicted for zero-temperature idealized sphere models and found in atomic and molecular glass…
We filled a void with a regular or asymmetric pattern without overlap using a time-dependent packing method termed random sequential adsorption (RSA). In the infinite-time limit, the density of coverage frequently hits a limit. This study focused on the saturation packing of squares and their dimers, trimers, tetramers, pentamers, and hexamers, all of which were orientated in two randomly chosen orientations (vertical and horizontal). Our results concurred with those of previous extrapolation-based research1. We used the "separating axis theorem" to detect if freshly added polygons and previou…
Swap algorithms can shift the glass transition to lower temperatures, a recent unexplained observation constraining the nature of this phenomenon. Here we show that swap dynamic is governed by an effective potential describing both particle interactions as well as their ability to change size. Requiring its stability is more demanding than for the potential energy alone. This result implies that stable configurations appear at lower energies with swap dynamics, and thus at lower temperatures when the liquid is cooled. \maa{ The magnitude of this effect is proportional to the width of the radii…
As a function of packing fraction at zero temperature and applied stress, an amorphous packing of spheres exhibits a jamming transition where the system is sensitive to boundary conditions even in the thermodynamic limit. Upon further compression, the system should become insensitive to boundary conditions provided it is sufficiently large. Here we explore the linear response to a large class of boundary perturbations in 2 and 3 dimensions. We consider each finite packing with periodic-boundary conditions as the basis of an infinite square or cubic lattice and study properties of vibrational m…
We study the vibrational properties near a free surface of disordered spring networks derived from jammed sphere packings. In bulk systems, without surfaces, it is well understood that such systems have a plateau in the density of vibrational modes extending down to a frequency scale $ω^*$. This frequency is controlled by $ΔZ = \langle Z \rangle - 2d$, the difference between the average coordination of the spheres and twice the spatial dimension, $d$, of the system, which vanishes at the jamming transition. In the presence of a free surface we find that there is a density of disordered vibrati…
We compare the harmonic and anharmonic properties of the vibrational modes in 3-dimensional jammed packings of frictionless spheres interacting via repulsive, finite range potentials. A crossover frequency is apparent in the density of states, the diffusivity and the participation ratio of the modes. At this frequency, which shifts to zero at the jamming threshold, the vibrational modes have a very small participation ratio implying that the modes are quasi-localized. The most anharmonic modes occur at low frequency which is opposite to what is normally found in crystals. The lowest frequency …
The structural properties of static, jammed packings of monodisperse spheres in the vicinity of the jamming transition are investigated using large-scale computer simulations. At small wavenumber $k$, we argue that the anomalous behavior in the static structure factor, $S(k) \sim k$, is consequential of an excess of low-frequency, collective excitations seen in the vibrational spectrum. This anomalous feature becomes more pronounced closest to the jamming transition, such that $S(0) \to 0$ at the transition point. We introduce an appropriate dispersion relation that accounts for these phenomen…
Several mean-field theories predict that Hessian matrices of amorphous solids can be written by using the random matrix in the limit of the large spatial dimensions $d\to\infty$. Motivated by these results, we here propose a way to map a Hessian of the amorphous solid to a random matrix. This is possible by determining the coefficients of a random matrix so that the trace of the random matrix coincides with the Hessian of the original system. We compare our result with that of previous numerical simulations of harmonic spheres in several spatial dimensions $d=3$, $5$, and $9$. For small pressu…
The jamming transition of non-spherical particles is fundamentally different from the spherical case. Non-spherical particles are hypostatic at their jamming points, while isostaticity is ensured in the case of the jamming of spherical particles. This structural difference implies that the presence of asphericity affects the critical exponents related to the contact number and the vibrational density of states. Moreover, while the force and gap distributions of isostatic jamming present power-law behaviors, even an infinitesimal asphericity is enough to smooth out these singularities. In a rec…
We study the vibrational modes of three-dimensional jammed packings of soft ellipsoids of revolution as a function of particle aspect ratio $ε$ and packing fraction. At the jamming transition for ellipsoids, as distinct from the idealized case using spheres where $ε= 1$, there are many unconstrained and non-trivial rotational degrees of freedom. These constitute a set of zero-frequency modes that are gradually mobilized into a new rotational band as $|ε- 1|$ increases. Quite surprisingly, as this new band is separated from zero frequency by a gap, and lies below the onset frequency for transla…
We characterize vibrational motion occurring at low temperatures in dense suspensions of soft repulsive spheres over a broad range of volume fractions encompassing the jamming transition at (T = 0, phi = phi_J). We find that characteristic time and length scales of thermal vibrations obey critical scaling in the vicinity of the jamming transition. We show in particular that the amplitude and the time scale of dynamic fluctuations diverge symmetrically on both sides of the transition, and directly reveal a diverging correlation length. The critical region near phi_J is divided in three differen…
Contact breaking and Hertzian interactions between grains can both give rise to nonlinear vibrational response of static granular packings. We perform molecular dynamics simulations at constant energy in 2D of frictionless bidisperse disks that interact via Hertzian spring potentials as a function of energy and measure directly the vibrational response from the Fourier transform of the velocity autocorrelation function. We compare the measured vibrational response of static packings near jamming onset to that obtained from the eigenvalues of the dynamical matrix to determine the temperature ab…
We have studied how 2- and 3- dimensional systems made up of particles interacting with finite range, repulsive potentials jam (i.e., develop a yield stress in a disordered state) at zero temperature and applied stress. For each configuration, there is a unique jamming threshold, $ϕ_c$, at which particles can no longer avoid each other and the bulk and shear moduli simultaneously become non-zero. The distribution of $ϕ_c$ values becomes narrower as the system size increases, so that essentially all configurations jam at the same $ϕ$ in the thermodynamic limit. This packing fraction corresponds…
Penrose tilings form lattices, exhibiting 5-fold symmetry and isotropic elasticity, with inhomogeneous coordination much like that of the force networks in jammed systems. Under periodic boundary conditions, their average coordination is exactly four. We study the elastic and vibrational properties of rational approximants to these lattices as a function of unit-cell size $N_S$ and find that they have of order $\sqrt{N_S}$ zero modes and states of self stress and yet all their elastic moduli vanish. In their generic form obtained by randomizing site positions, their elastic and vibrational pro…
By analyzing the displacement statistics of an assembly of horizontally vibrated bidisperse frictional grains in the vicinity of the jamming transition experimentally studied before, we establish that their superdiffusive motion is a genuine Levy flight, but with `jump' size very small compared to the diameter of the grains. The vibration induces a broad distribution of jumps that are random in time, but correlated in space, and that can be interpreted as micro-crack events at all scales. As the volume fraction departs from the critical jamming density, this distribution is truncated at a smal…
Vibrational spectra and normal modes of mechanically stable particle packings in three dimensions are analyzed over a range of compressions, from near the jamming transition, where the packings lose their rigidity, to far above it. At high frequency, the normal modes are localized at all compressions. At low frequency, the nature of the modes depends somewhat on compression. At large compressions, far from the transition, the lowest-frequency normal modes have some plane-wave character, though less than one would expect for a crystalline or isotropic solid. At low compressions near the jamming…
Proximity to Jamming Governs Acoustic Attenuation in Damped Packings
Van der Waals-Zeeman Institute, Institute of Physics, University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学物理学院范德瓦尔斯-泽曼研究所）；Naval Postgraduate School（美国海军研究生院）；Process and Energy Laboratory, Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学能源与工艺实验室）
