English

Oscillatory Instabilities in Frictional Granular Matter

Soft Condensed Matter 2019-09-04 v2 Materials Science Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

Frictional granular matter is shown to be fundamentally different in its plastic responses to external strains from generic glasses and amorphous solids without friction. While regular glasses exhibit plastic instabilities due to a vanishing of a real eigenvalue of the Hessian matrix, frictional granular materials can exhibit a previously unnoticed additional mechanism for instabilities, i.e. the appearance of a pair of complex eigenvalues leading to oscillatory exponential growth of perturbations which are tamed by dynamical nonlinearities. This fundamental difference appears crucial for the understanding of plasticity and failure in frictional granular materials. The possible relevance to earthquake physics is discussed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1901.02376,
  title  = {Oscillatory Instabilities in Frictional Granular Matter},
  author = {Joyjit Chattoraj and Oleg Gendelman and Massimo Pica Ciamarra and Itamar Procaccia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.02376},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Supplementary materials follows the main text Animation of the instability: https://vimeo.com/310132278

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:06:10.336Z