We derive exact results for displacement fields that develop as a response to external pinning forces in two dimensional athermal networks. For a triangular lattice arrangement of particles interacting through soft potentials, we develop a Green's function formalism which we use to derive exact results for displacement fields produced by localized external forces. We show that in the continuum limit the displacement fields decay as $1/r$ at large distances $r$ away from a force dipole. Finally, we extend our formulation to study correlations in the displacement fields produced by the external pinning forces. We show that uncorrelated pinned forces at each vertex give rise to long-range correlations in displacements in athermal systems, with a non-trivial system size dependence. We verify our predictions with numerical simulations of athermal networks in two dimensions.
The super-cooled $N3$ model exhibits an increasingly slow dynamics as density approaches the model's random closest packing density. Here, we present a direct measurement of the dynamical correlation function $G_4(r,t)$, showing the emergence of a growing length scale $ξ_4$ across which the dynamics is correlated. The correlation length measured, up to 120 lattice sites, power-law diverges as the density approaches $ρ_t$, the density at which the fluid phase of the model is predicted to terminate. It is shown that the four-point susceptibility, often used as an agent to estimate $ξ_4$, does no…
We use numerical simulations to study the flow of athermal, frictionless, soft-core two dimensional spherocylinders driven by a uniform steady-state simple shear applied at a fixed volume and a fixed finite strain rate $\dotγ$. Energy dissipation is via a viscous drag with respect to a uniformly sheared host fluid, giving a simple model for flow in a non-Brownian suspension with Newtonian rheology. We study the resulting spatial structure of the sheared system, and compute correlation functions of the velocity, the particle density, the nematic order parameter, and the particle angular velocit…
We present a derivation of a recently proposed theory for the time dependence of density fluctuations in stationary states of strongly interacting, athermal, self-propelled particles. The derivation consists of two steps. First, we start from the equation of motion for the joint distribution of particles' positions and self-propulsions and we integrate out the self-propulsions. In this way we derive an approximate, many-particle evolution equation for the probability distribution of the particles' positions. Second, we use this evolution equation to describe the time dependence of steady-state…
Dynamics of jammed packings of soft athermal disks under finite-rate shear are studied by means of molecular dynamics simulations. Particularly, we investigate the spatial structures of stress drop events, which are expected to provide information about plasticity. Investigating the displacement fields during stress drop events, we show that there are qualitatively different two types of events in the low rate limit: localized ones and extended ones. We further investigate the time evolution of events and clarify that both types of events are due to oscillatory motion of the stress, which is u…
We derive exact results for correlations in the displacement fields $\{ δ\vec{r} \} \equiv \{ δr_{μ= x,y} \}$ in near-crystalline athermal systems in two dimensions. We analyze the displacement correlations produced by different types of microscopic disorder, and show that disorder at the microscopic scale gives rise to long-range correlations with a dependence on the system size $L$ given by $\langle δr_μ δr_ν \rangle \sim c_{μν}(r/L,θ)$. In addition, we show that polydispersity in the constituent particle sizes and random bond disorder give rise to a logarithmic system size scaling, with $c_…
Although the notion of mechanical noise is expected to play a key role in the non-linear rheology of athermally sheared amorphous systems, its characterization has so far remained elusive. Here, we show using molecular dynamic simulations that in spite of the presence of strong spatio-temporal correlations in the system, the local stress exhibits normal diffusion under the effect of the mechanical noise in the finite driving regime. The diffusion constant appears to be proportional to the mean plastic activity. Our data suggests that the corresponding proportionality constant is density indepe…
When an amorphous solid is deformed homogeneously, the response exhibits heterogeneous plastic instabilities with localized cooperative rearrangement of cluster of particles. The heterogeneous behavior plays an important role in deciding the mechanical properties of amorphous solids. In this paper, we employ computer simulation to study the characteristics and the spatial correlations of these clusters characterized by the non-affine displacements in amorphous solids under simple shear deformation in the athermal quasistatic limit. The clusters with large displacements are found to be homogene…
We simulate a relaxation process of non-brownian particles in a sheared viscous medium; the small shear strain is initially applied to a system, which then undergoes relaxation. The relaxation time and the correlation length are estimated as functions of density, which algebraically diverge at the jamming density. This implies that the relaxation time can be scaled by the correlation length using the dynamic critical exponent, which is estimated as 4.6(2). It is also found that shear stress undergoes power-law decay at the jamming density, which is reminiscent of critical slowing down.
We consider a model of self-propelled dynamics for athermal active particles, where the non-equilibrium active forces are modelled by a Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process. In the limit of no-driving force, the model reduces to the passive, Brownian dynamics of an atomistic glass forming fluid, the Wahnström binary mixture. The Wahnström mixture is known to show strong correlations between the emergence of slow dynamics and the formation of locally favoured structures based on icosahedra. Here, we study how the non-equilibrium forces affect the local structure of the system, and find that these strongl…
We carry our 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, $ξ$ and $\ell$, 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 $\ell$ is a consequence of a dangerous irrelevant scaling variable, and that it is $ξ$ which is the correlation length that determines the divergence of the system viscosity as jamming is app…
The slow flow of amorphous solids exhibits striking heterogeneities: swift localised particle rearrangements take place in the midst of a more or less homogeneously deforming medium. Recently, experimental as well as numerical work has revealed spatial correlations between these flow heterogeneities. Here, we use molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to characterise the rearrangements and systematically probe their correlations both in time and in space. In particular, these correlations display a four-fold azimuthal symmetry characteristic of shear stress redistribution in an elastic medium and…
We study jammed near-crystalline materials composed of frictionless spheres in three dimensions. We analyze the fluctuations in positions and forces produced by small polydispersity in particle sizes. We generalize a recently developed perturbation expansion about the crystalline ordered state to three dimensional systems. This allows us to exactly predict changes in positions and forces as a response to the changes in particle radii. We show that fluctuations in forces orthogonal to the lattice directions are highly constrained as compared to the fluctuations along lattice directions. Additio…
We apply principal component analysis, a method frequently used in image processing and unsupervised machine learning, to characterize particle displacements observed in the steady shear flow of amorphous solids. PCA produces a low-dimensional representation of the data and clearly reveals the dominant features of elastic (i.e. reversible) and plastic deformation. We show that the principal directions of PCA in the plastic regime correspond to the soft (i.e. zero energy) modes of the elastic propagator that governs the redistribution of shear stress due to localized plastic events. Projections…
We use a simple mode-coupling approach to investigate glassy dynamics of partially pinned fluid systems. Our approach is different from the mode-coupling theory developed by Krakoviack [Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 065703 (2005), Phys. Rev. E 84, 050501(R) (2011)]. In contrast to Krakoviack's theory, our approach predicts a random pinning glass transition scenario that is qualitatively the same as the scenario obtained using a mean-field analysis of the spherical p-spin model and a mean-field version of the random first-order transition theory. We use our approach to calculate quantities which are oft…
We study, using functional renormalization (FRG), two copies of an elastic system pinned by mutually correlated random potentials. Short scale decorrelation depend on a non trivial boundary layer regime with (possibly multiple) chaos exponents. Large scale mutual displacement correlation behave as $|x-x'|^{2 ζ- μ}$, the decorrelation exponent $μ$ proportional to the difference between Flory (or mean field) and exact roughness exponent $ζ$. For short range disorder $μ>0$ but small, e.g. for random bond interfaces $μ= 5 ζ- ε$, $ε=4-d$, and $μ= ε(\frac{(2 π)^2}{36} - 1)$ for the one component Bra…
The relation between thermal fluctuations and the mechanical response of a free membrane has been explored in great detail, both theoretically and experimentally. However, understanding this relationship for membranes, locally pinned by proteins, is significantly more challenging. Given that the coupling of the membrane to the cell cytoskeleton, the extracellular matrix and to other internal structures is crucial for the regulation of a number of cellular processes, understanding the role of the pinning is of great interest. In this manuscript we consider a single protein (elastic spring of a …
Recently, some of us developed a novel model glass-forming liquid with k extra interactions with pseudo neighbours to each liquid particle over and above the regular interactions with its neighbours. Analysis of the structure and dynamics of these systems showed that with an increase in k the systems have more mean-field like properties. This work presents an extensive study of the thermodynamics of the above-mentioned model for several values of k and its correlation with the dynamics. We surprisingly find that the usual thermodynamic integration (TI) method of calculating the entropy provide…
It is now well-established that mechanical equilibrium in athermal disordered solids gives rise to anisotropic spatial correlations of the coarse-grained stress field that decay in space as $1/r^d$, where $r$ is the distance from the origin, and $d$ denotes the spatial dimension. In this note we present a simple, geometry based argument for the scaling form of the emergent spatial correlations of the stress field in disordered solids.
One of the most remarkable observations in dense active matter systems is the appearance of long-range velocity correlations without any explicit aligning interaction (of e.g.\ Vicsek type). Here we show that this kind of long range velocity correlation can also be generated in a dense athermal passive system by the inclusion of a very small fraction of active Brownian particles. We develop a continuum theory to explain the emergence of velocity correlations generated via such active dopants. We validate the predictions for the effects of magnitude and persistence time of the active force and …
Using theoretical arguments and extensive Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of a coarse-grained three-dimensional off-lattice model of a β-hairpin, we demonstrate that the equilibrium critical force, $F_c$, needed to unfold the biopolymer increases non-linearly with increasing volume fraction occupied by the spherical macromolecular crowding agent. Both scaling arguments and MC simulations show that the critical force increases as $F_c \approx φ_c^α$. The exponent $α$ is linked to the Flory exponent relating the size of the unfolded state of the biopolymer and the number of amino acids. The predict…
Many active materials and biological systems are driven far from equilibrium by embedded agents that spontaneously generate forces and distort the surrounding material. Probing and characterizing these athermal fluctuations is essential for understanding the properties and behaviors of such systems. Here we present a mathematical procedure to estimate the local action of force-generating agents from the observed fluctuating displacement fields. The active agents are modeled as oriented force dipoles or isotropic compression foci, and the matrix on which they act is assumed to be either a compr…
Strained amorphous solids often fail mechanically by creating a shear-band. It had been understood that the shear banding instability is usefully described as crossing a spinodal point (with disorder) in an appropriate thermodynamic description. It remained contested however whether the spinodal is critical (with divergent correlation length) or not. Here we offer evidence for critical spinodal by using particle pinning. For a finite concentration of pinned particles the correlation length is bounded by the average distance between pinned particles, but without pinning it is bounded by the sys…
We investigate the spatial correlations of microscopic stresses in soft particulate gels, using 2D and 3D numerical simulations. We use a recently developed theoretical framework predicting the analytical form of stress-stress correlations in amorphous assemblies of athermal grains that acquire rigidity under an external load. These correlations exhibit a pinch-point singularity in Fourier space leading to long-range correlations and strong anisotropy in real space, which are at the origin of force-chains in granular solids. Our analysis for the model particulate gels at low particle volume fr…
We conduct athermal simulations of freely-cooling, viscous soft spheres around the jamming transition density ϕ_{J}, and find evidence for a growing length ξ(t) that governs relaxation to mechanical equilibrium. ξ(t) is manifest in both the velocity correlation function, and the spatial correlations in a scalar measure of local force balance which we define. Data for different densities ϕcan be collapsed onto two master curves by scaling ξ(t) and t by powers of |ϕ-ϕ_{J}|, indicative of critical scaling. Furthermore, particle transport for ϕ>ϕ_{J} exhibits aging and superdiffusion similar to a …
Stress in dense granular materials and other athermal particle aggregates is transmitted through a visually striking subnetwork of interparticle contacts, the filamentary segments of which are referred to as force chains. The emergence of such preferred subnetwork in structurally disordered media with constituents interacting primarily by physical contact is not fully understood. In this work, we study locally correlated transport in Random Geometric Graphs (RGGs), and show the spontaneous emergence of preferred subnetwork. Our findings reveal that, despite structural disorder, system spanning…
A minimal description of the inherent states of amorphous solids is presented. Using field theory, applicable when a system is probed at long length scales, it is shown that athermal amorphous solids have long-range correlations in their stresses, as recently observed in supercooled liquids, colloids, and granular matter. Explicit predictions for the correlators are presented, in both 2D and 3D, in excellent agreement with simulation data on supercooled liquids. It is shown that when applied to solids with strictly repulsive interactions, the simplest, naïve theory leads to a paradox. This par…
