Related papers: A statistical mechanics framework for static granu…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
The mechanical response of naturally abundant amorphous solids such as gels, jammed grains, and biological tissues are not described by the conventional paradigm of broken symmetry that defines crystalline elasticity. In contrast, the…
A rich variety of amorphous solids are found in nature and technology, including ones formed via the vulcanization of long, flexible molecules. A special class -- those featuring a wide gap between the long timescales over which constraints…
Simple homogeneous shear flows of frictionless, deformable particles are studied by particle simulations at large shear rates and for differently soft, deformable particles. The particle stiffness sets a time-scale that can be used to scale…
We present simple models of particulate materials whose mechanical integrity arises from a jamming process. We argue that such media are generically "fragile", that is, they are unable to support certain types of incremental loading without…
In the late 1980s, Sam Edwards proposed a possible statistical-mechanical framework to describe the properties of disordered granular materials. A key assumption underlying the theory was that all jammed packings are equally likely. In the…
Amorphous packings of spheres have been intensely investigated in order to understand the mechanical and flow behaviour of dense granular matter, and to explore universal aspects of the transition from fluid to structurally arrested or…
These lecture notes cover the statics and glassy dynamics of granular media. Most of the lectures were in fact devoted to `force propagation' models. We discuss the experimental and theoretical motivations for these approaches, and their…
We briefly review the basics ideas and results of a recently proposed statistical mechanical approach to granular materials. Using lattice models from standard Statistical Mechanics and results from a mean field replica approach and Monte…
Interest in the dynamical arrest leading to a fluid --> solid transition in thermal and athermal systems has led to questions about the nature of these transitions. These jamming transitions may be dependent on the influence of extended…
We combine the shear-transformation-zone (STZ) theory of amorphous plasticity with Edwards' statistical theory of granular materials to describe shear flow in a disordered system of thermalized hard spheres. The equations of motion for this…
Granular materials are defined as collections of macroscopic dissipative particles. Although these systems are ubiquitous in our lives, the nature and the causes of their non-trivial collective dynamics still remain elusive and have…
Understanding granular and other athermal systems requires the identification of state variables which consistently predict their bulk properties. A promising approach has been to draw on the techniques of equilibrium statistical mechanics,…
The physics of disordered media, from metallic glasses to colloidal suspensions, granular matter and biological tissues, offers difficult challenges because it often occurs far from equilibrium, in materials lacking symmetries and evolving…
We investigate experimentally the mechanical response of a monolayer of bi-disperse frictional grains to an inhomogeneous shear perturbation across the jamming transition. We inflate an intruder inside the packing and use photo-elasticity…
We discuss the statistical mechanics of granular matter and derive several significant results. First, we show that, contrary to common belief, the volume and stress ensembles are inter-dependent, necessitating the use of both. We use the…
Stress-based ensembles incorporating temperature-like variables have been proposed as a route to an equation of state for granular materials. To test the efficacy of this approach, we perform experiments on a two-dimensional photoelastic…
Marginally stable solids have peculiar physical properties that were discovered and analyzed in the context of the jamming transition. We theoretically investigate the existence of marginal stability in a prototypical model for structural…
By minimizing a thermodynamic-like potential, we unbiasedly sample the potential energy landscape of soft and frictionless spheres under constant shear stress. We obtain zero-temperature jammed states under desired shear stresses and…
We study the jamming phase diagram of sheared granular material using a novel Couette shear set-up with multi-ring bottom. The set-up uses small basal friction forces to apply a volume-conserving linear shear with no shear band to a…