No Arabic abstract
We focus on the response of mechanically stable (MS) packings of frictionless, bidisperse disks to thermal fluctuations, with the aim of quantifying how nonlinearities affect system properties at finite temperature. Packings of disks with purely repulsive contact interactions possess two main types of nonlinearities, one from the form of the interaction potential and one from the breaking (or forming) of interparticle contacts. To identify the temperature regime at which the contact-breaking nonlinearities begin to contribute, we first calculated the minimum temperatures $T_{cb}$ required to break a single contact in the MS packing for both single and multiple eigenmode perturbations of the $T=0$ MS packing. We then studied deviations in the constant volume specific heat $C_V$ and deviations of the average disk positions $Delta r$ from their $T=0$ values in the temperature regime $T_{cb} < T < T_{r}$, where $T_r$ is the temperature beyond which the system samples the basin of a new MS packing. We find that the deviation in the specific heat per particle $Delta {overline C}_V^0/{overline C}_V^0$ relative to the zero temperature value ${overline C}_V^0$ can grow rapidly above $T_{cb}$, however, the deviation $Delta {overline C}_V^0/{overline C}_V^0$ decreases as $N^{-1}$ with increasing system size. To characterize the relative strength of contact-breaking versus form nonlinearities, we measured the ratio of the average position deviations $Delta r^{ss}/Delta r^{ds}$ for single- and double-sided linear and nonlinear spring interactions. We find that $Delta r^{ss}/Delta r^{ds} > 100$ for linear spring interactions and is independent of system size.
We compare the elastic response of spring networks whose contact geometry is derived from real packings of frictionless discs, to networks obtained by randomly cutting bonds in a highly connected network derived from a well-compressed packing. We find that the shear response of packing-derived networks, and both the shear and compression response of randomly cut networks, are all similar: the elastic moduli vanish linearly near jamming, and distributions characterizing the local geometry of the response scale with distance to jamming. Compression of packing-derived networks is exceptional: the elastic modulus remains constant and the geometrical distributions do not exhibit simple scaling. We conclude that the compression response of jammed packings is anomalous, rather than the shear response.
The mechanical response of packings of purely repulsive, spherical particles to athermal, quasistatic simple shear near jamming onset is highly nonlinear. Previous studies have shown that, at small pressure $p$, the ensemble-averaged static shear modulus $langle G-G_0 rangle$ scales with $p^alpha$, where $alpha approx 1$, but above a characteristic pressure $p^{**}$, $langle G-G_0 rangle sim p^beta$, where $beta approx 0.5$. However, we find that the shear modulus $G^i$ for an individual packing typically decreases linearly with $p$ along a geometrical family where the contact network does not change. We resolve this discrepancy by showing that, while the shear modulus does decrease linearly within geometrical families, $langle G rangle$ also depends on a contribution from discontinuous jumps in $langle G rangle$ that occur at the transitions between geometrical families. For $p > p^{**}$, geometrical-family and rearrangement contributions to $langle G rangle$ are of opposite signs and remain comparable for all system sizes. $langle G rangle$ can be described by a scaling function that smoothly transitions between the two power-law exponents $alpha$ and $beta$. We also demonstrate the phenomenon of {it compression unjamming}, where a jammed packing can unjam via isotropic compression.
At low volume fraction, disordered arrangements of frictionless spheres are found in un--jammed states unable to support applied stresses, while at high volume fraction they are found in jammed states with mechanical strength. Here we show, focusing on the hard sphere zero pressure limit, that the transition between un-jammed and jammed states does not occur at a single value of the volume fraction, but in a whole volume fraction range. This result is obtained via the direct numerical construction of disordered jammed states with a volume fraction varying between two limits, $0.636$ and $0.646$. We identify these limits with the random loose packing volume fraction $rl$ and the random close packing volume fraction $rc$ of frictionless spheres, respectively.
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 above which the linear response breaks down. We compare packings that interact via single-sided (purely repulsive) and double-sided Hertzian spring interactions to disentangle the effects of the shape of the potential from contact breaking. Our studies show that while Hertzian interactions lead to weak nonlinearities in the vibrational behavior (e.g. the generation of harmonics of the eigenfrequencies of the dynamical matrix), the vibrational response of static packings with Hertzian contact interactions is dominated by contact breaking as found for systems with repulsive linear spring interactions.
We perform computational studies of repulsive, frictionless disks to investigate the development of stress anisotropy in mechanically stable (MS) packings. We focus on two protocols for generating MS packings: 1) isotropic compression and 2) applied simple or pure shear strain $gamma$ at fixed packing fraction $phi$. MS packings of frictionless disks occur as geometric families (i.e. parabolic segments with positive curvature) in the $phi$-$gamma$ plane. MS packings from protocol 1 populate parabolic segments with both signs of the slope, $dphi/dgamma >0$ and $dphi/dgamma <0$. In contrast, MS packings from protocol 2 populate segments with $dphi/dgamma <0$ only. For both simple and pure shear, we derive a relationship between the stress anisotropy and dilatancy $dphi/dgamma$ obeyed by MS packings along geometrical families. We show that for MS packings prepared using isotropic compression, the stress anisotropy distribution is Gaussian centered at zero with a standard deviation that decreases with increasing system size. For shear jammed MS packings, the stress anisotropy distribution is a convolution of Weibull distributions that depend on strain, which has a nonzero average and standard deviation in the large-system limit. We also develop a framework to calculate the stress anisotropy distribution for packings generated via protocol 2 in terms of the stress anisotropy distribution for packings generated via protocol 1. These results emphasize that for repulsive frictionless disks, different packing-generation protocols give rise to different MS packing probabilities, which lead to differences in macroscopic properties of MS packings.