No Arabic abstract
We investigate the mechanical response of jammed packings of circulo-lines, interacting via purely repulsive, linear spring forces, as a function of pressure $P$ during athermal, quasistatic isotropic compression. Prior work has shown that the ensemble-averaged shear modulus for jammed disk packings scales as a power-law, $langle G(P) rangle sim P^{beta}$, with $beta sim 0.5$, over a wide range of pressure. For packings of circulo-lines, we also find robust power-law scaling of $langle G(P)rangle$ over the same range of pressure for aspect ratios ${cal R} gtrsim 1.2$. However, the power-law scaling exponent $beta sim 0.8$-$0.9$ is much larger than that for jammed disk packings. To understand the origin of this behavior, we decompose $langle Grangle$ into separate contributions from geometrical families, $G_f$, and from changes in the interparticle contact network, $G_r$, such that $langle G rangle = langle G_frangle + langle G_r rangle$. We show that the shear modulus for low-pressure geometrical families for jammed packings of circulo-lines can both increase {it and} decrease with pressure, whereas the shear modulus for low-pressure geometrical families for jammed disk packings only decreases with pressure. For this reason, the geometrical family contribution $langle G_f rangle$ is much larger for jammed packings of circulo-lines than for jammed disk packings at finite pressure, causing the increase in the power-law scaling exponent.
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.
We numerically investigate the mechanical properties of static packings of ellipsoidal particles in 2D and 3D over a range of aspect ratio and compression $Delta phi$. While amorphous packings of spherical particles at jamming onset ($Delta phi=0$) are isostatic and possess the minimum contact number $z_{rm iso}$ required for them to be collectively jammed, amorphous packings of ellipsoidal particles generally possess fewer contacts than expected for collective jamming ($z < z_{rm iso}$) from naive counting arguments, which assume that all contacts give rise to linearly independent constraints on interparticle separations. To understand this behavior, we decompose the dynamical matrix $M=H-S$ for static packings of ellipsoidal particles into two important components: the stiffness $H$ and stress $S$ matrices. We find that the stiffness matrix possesses $N(z_{rm iso} - z)$ eigenmodes ${hat e}_0$ with zero eigenvalues even at finite compression, where $N$ is the number of particles. In addition, these modes ${hat e}_0$ are nearly eigenvectors of the dynamical matrix with eigenvalues that scale as $Delta phi$, and thus finite compression stabilizes packings of ellipsoidal particles. At jamming onset, the harmonic response of static packings of ellipsoidal particles vanishes, and the total potential energy scales as $delta^4$ for perturbations by amplitude $delta$ along these `quartic modes, ${hat e}_0$. These findings illustrate the significant differences between static packings of spherical and ellipsoidal particles.
We report numerical results of effective attractive forces on the packing properties of two-dimensional elongated grains. In deposits of non-cohesive rods in 2D, the topology of the packing is mainly dominated by the formation of ordered structures of aligned rods. Elongated particles tend to align horizontally and the stress is mainly transmitted from top to bottom, revealing an asymmetric distribution of local stress. However, for deposits of cohesive particles, the preferred horizontal orientation disappears. Very elongated particles with strong attractive forces form extremely loose structures, characterized by an orientation distribution, which tends to a uniform behavior when increasing the Bond number. As a result of these changes, the pressure distribution in the deposits changes qualitatively. The isotropic part of the local stress is notably enhanced with respect to the deviatoric part, which is related to the gravity direction. Consequently, the lateral stress transmission is dominated by the enhanced disorder and leads to a faster pressure saturation with depth.
The dense packing of interacting particles on spheres has proved to be a useful model for virus capsids and colloidosomes. Indeed, icosahedral symmetry observed in virus capsids corresponds to potential energy minima that occur for magic numbers of, e.g., 12, 32 and 72 identical Lennard-Jones particles, for which the packing has exactly the minimum number of twelve five-fold defects. It is unclear, however, how stable these structures are against thermal agitation. We investigate this property by means of basin-hopping global optimisation and Langevin dynamics for particle numbers between ten and one hundred. An important measure is the number and type of point defects, that is, particles that do not have six nearest neighbours. We find that small icosahedral structures are the most robust against thermal fluctuations, exhibiting fewer excess defects and rearrangements for a wide temperature range. Furthermore, we provide evidence that excess defects appearing at low non-zero temperatures lower the potential energy at the expense of entropy. At higher temperatures defects are, as expected, thermally excited and thus entropically stabilised. If we replace the Lennard-Jones potential by a very short-ranged (Morse) potential, which is arguably more appropriate for colloids and virus capsid proteins, we find that the same particle numbers give a minimum in the potential energy, although for larger particle numbers these minima correspond to different packings. Furthermore, defects are more difficult to excite thermally for the short-ranged potential, suggesting that the short-ranged interaction further stabilises equilibrium structures.
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.