Comment on 'Repulsive Contact Interactions Make Jammed Particulate Systems Inherently Nonharmonic'

Abstract

In their Letter, Schreck, Bertrand, O'Hern and Shattuck [Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 078301 (2011)] study nonlinearities in jammed particulate systems that arise when contacts are altered. They conclude that there is "no harmonic regime in the large system limit for all compressions" and "at jamming onset for any system size." Their argument rests on the claim that for finite-range repulsive potentials, of the form used in studies of jamming, the breaking or forming of a single contact is sufficient to destroy the linear regime. We dispute these conclusions and argue that linear response is both justified and essential for understanding the nature of the jammed solid.

References in corpus (3)

• Jamming at Zero Temperature and Zero Applied Stress: the Epitome of Disorder
• Dynamic criticality at the jamming transition
• Critical scalings and jamming in thermal colloidal systems

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Softening and Yielding of Soft Glassy Materials
• Beyond linear elasticity: Jammed solids at finite shear strain and rate
• Contact Changes near Jamming
• Contact nonlinearities and linear response in jammed particulate packings
• Cut-off nonlinearities in the low-temperature vibrations of glasses and crystals
• Contact Changes of Sheared Systems: Scaling, Correlations, and Mechanisms
• Echoes from Anharmonic Normal Modes in Model Glasses