A microscopic mean-field theory of the jamming transition

Abstract

Dense particle packings acquire rigidity through a nonequilibrium jamming transition commonly observed in materials from emulsions to sandpiles. We describe athermal packings and their observed geometric phase transitions using fully equilibrium statistical mechanics and develop a microscopic many-body mean-field theory of the jamming transition for soft repulsive spherical particles. We derive analytically some of the scaling laws and exponents characterizing the transition and obtain predictions for microscopic correlation functions of jammed states that are amenable to experimental verifications, and whose accuracy we confirm using computer simulations.

4 pages, 4 figs

References in corpus (5)

• The glass transition of dense fluids of hard and compressible spheres
• A Landscape Analysis of Constraint Satisfaction Problems
• Compressing nearly hard sphere fluids increases glass fragility
• Glass Transition for Driven Granular Fluids
• Can the jamming transition be described using equilibrium statistical mechanics?

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Unified study of glass and jamming rheology in soft particle systems
• Jamming Criticality Revealed by Removing Localized Buckling Excitations
• Dynamic criticality at the jamming transition
• Replica theory of the rigidity of structural glasses
• Thermal fluctuations, mechanical response, and hyperuniformity in jammed solids
• Disordered Solids Without Well-Defined Transverse Phonons: The Nature of Hard Sphere Glasses
• Devising a protocol-related statistical mechanics framework for granular materials