Soft Sphere Packings at Finite Pressure but Unstable to Shear
Abstract
When are athermal soft sphere packings jammed ? Any experimentally relevant definition must at the very least require a jammed packing to resist shear. We demonstrate that widely used (numerical) protocols in which particles are compressed together, can and do produce packings which are unstable to shear - and that the probability of generating such packings reaches one near jamming. We introduce a new protocol that, by allowing the system to explore different box shapes as it equilibrates, generates truly jammed packings with strictly positive shear moduli G. For these packings, the scaling of the average of G is consistent with earlier results, while the probability distribution P(G) exhibits novel and rich scaling
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1203.3364,
title = {Soft Sphere Packings at Finite Pressure but Unstable to Shear},
author = {S. Dagois-Bohy and B. P. Tighe and J. Simon and S. Henkes and M. van Hecke},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.3364},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
5 pages, 6 figures. Resubmitted to Physical Review Letters after a few changes