Hyperuniform Jammed Sphere Packings Have Anomalous Material Properties

Abstract

A spatial distribution is hyperuniform if it has local density fluctuations that vanish in the limit of long length scales. Hyperuniformity is a well known property of both crystals and quasicrystals. Of recent interest, however, is disordered hyperuniformity: the presence of hyperuniform scaling without long-range configurational order. Jammed granular packings have been proposed as an example of disordered hyperuniformity, but recent numerical investigation has revealed that many jammed systems instead exhibit a complex set of distinct behaviors at long, emergent length scales. We use the Voronoi tesselation as a tool to define a set of rescaling transformations that can impose hyperuniformity on an arbitrary weighted point process, and show that these transformations can be used in simulations to iteratively generate hyperuniform, mechanically stable packings of athermal soft spheres. These hyperuniform jammed packings display atypical mechanical properties, particularly in the low-frequency phononic excitations, which exhibit an isolated band of highly collective modes and a band-gap around zero frequency.

References in corpus (7)

• Jamming at Zero Temperature and Zero Applied Stress: the Epitome of Disorder
• Hyperuniformity and its Generalizations
• Hyperuniform density fluctuations and diverging dynamic correlations in periodically driven colloidal suspensions
• Designing Disordered Hyperuniform Two-Phase Materials with Novel Physical Properties
• Hyperuniform structures formed by shearing colloidal suspensions
• Disordered hyperuniformity in two-component non-additive hard disk plasmas
• Methodology to Construct Large Realizations of Perfectly Hyperuniform Disordered Packings