Related papers: Edwards Statistical Mechanics for Jammed Granular …
The application of concepts from equilibrium statistical mechanics to out-of-equilibrium systems has a long history of describing diverse systems ranging from glasses to granular materials. For dissipative jammed systems-- particulate…
A thermodynamic formulation of jammed matter is reviewed. Experiments and simulations of compressed emulsions and granular materials are then used to provide a foundation for the thermodynamics.
Granular matter exists out of thermal equilibrium, i.e. it is athermal. While conventional equilibrium statistical mechanics is not useful for characterizing granular materials, the idea of constructing a statistical ensemble analogous to…
We introduce a "Hamiltonian"-like function, called the volume function, indispensable to describe the ensemble of jammed matter such as granular materials and emulsions from a geometrical point of view. The volume function represents the…
Using confocal microscopy we investigate the effect of attraction on the packing of polydisperse emulsions under gravity. We find that the distributions of neighbors, coordination number, and local packing fraction as a function of…
A new first-principles statistical mechanics formulation is proposed to describe slow and dilated granular fluids, where prolonged intergranular contacts vitiate collision theory. The contacts, where all the important physics takes place,…
Can one construct a thermodynamics for compact, slowly moving powders and grains? A few years ago, Edwards proposed a possible step in this direction, raising the fascinating perspective that such systems have a statistical mechanics of…
We investigate the distribution of the volume and coordination number associated to each particle in a jammed packing of monodisperse hard sphere using the mesoscopic ensemble developed in Nature 453, 606 (2008). Theory predicts an…
This is the first of a series of three articles that treats fracture localization as a critical phenomenon. This first article establishes a statistical mechanics based on ensemble averages when fluctuations through time play no role in…
Packing problems have been a source of fascination for millenia and their study has produced a rich literature that spans numerous disciplines. Investigations of hard-particle packing models have provided basic insights into the structure…
The nature of randomness in disordered packings of frictional and frictionless spheres is investigated using theory and simulations of identical spherical grains. The entropy of the packings is defined through the force and volume ensemble…
By detailed Molecular Dynamics and Monte Carlo simulations %of a realistic model we show that granular materials at rest can be described as thermodynamics systems. First we show that granular packs can be characterized by few parameters,…
Jamming is a common feature of out of equilibrium systems showing slow relaxation dynamics. Here we review our efforts in understanding jamming in granular materials using experiments and computer simulations. We first obtain an estimation…
At the core of equilibrium statistical mechanics lies the notion of statistical ensembles: a collection of microstates, each occurring with a given a priori probability that depends only on a few macroscopic parameters such as temperature,…
Years ago Edwards proposed a thermodynamic description of dense granular matter, in which the grains (the `atoms' of the system) interact with inelastic forces. The approach is intriguing but is not justified from first principles, and…
We investigate the nature of randomness in disordered packings of frictional spheres. We calculate the entropy of 3D packings through the force and volume ensemble of jammed matter, a mesoscopic ensemble and numerical simulations using…
When a granular system is tapped, its volume changes. Here, using a well-defined macroscopic protocol, we prepare an ensemble of granular systems and track the statistics of volume changes as a function of the number of taps. This is in…
Using X-ray tomography, we experimentally investigate granular segregation phenomena in a mixture of particles with different densities under quasi-static cyclic shear. We quantitatively characterize their height distributions at steady…
Granular matter like sand is composed of a large number of interacting grains, and is thus expected to be amenable to a statistical physics treatment. Yet, the frictional properties of grains make the statistical physics of granular matter…
Jammed packings' mechanical properties depend sensitively on their detailed local structure. Here we provide a complete characterization of the pair correlation close to contact and of the force distribution of jammed frictionless spheres.…