Jamming in hard sphere suspensions under shear

Abstract

We consider a system of monodisperse hard spheres immersed in a sheared fluid. We obtain the distortion of the structure factor of the hard spheres at low shear rates, within a Percus-Yevick like framework. The consequent distortion of the pair distribution function is shown to affect the transition of the hard sphere fluid into a jammed state, which is similar to the transition to the state of random close packing in the absence of shear.