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 glasses; there is a boson peak at low frequency that shifts to higher frequency as the system is compressed above the jamming transition.
By calculating the linear response of packings of soft frictionless discs to quasistatic external perturbations, we investigate the critical scaling behavior of their elastic properties and non-affine deformations as a function of the distance to jam
ming. Averaged over an ensemble of similar packings, these systems are well described by elasticity, while in single packings we determine a diverging length scale $ell^*$ up to which the response of the system is dominated by the local packing disorder. This length scale, which we observe directly, diverges as $1/Delta z$, where $Delta z$ is the difference between contact number and its isostatic value, and appears to scale identically to the length scale which had been introduced earlier in the interpretation of the spectrum of vibrational modes. It governs the crossover from isostatic behavior at the small scale to continuum behavior at the large scale; indeed we identify this length scale with the coarse graining length needed to obtain a smooth stress field. We characterize the non-affine displacements of the particles using the emph{displacement angle distribution}, a local measure for the amount of relative sliding, and analyze the connection between local relative displacements and the elastic moduli.
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 fin
d 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.
