Instabilities of Jammed Packings of Frictionless Spheres Under Load

Ning Xu, Andrea J. Liu, and Sidney R. Nagel

Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 215502 – Published 20 November 2017

Abstract

We consider the contribution to the density of vibrational states and the distribution of energy barrier heights of incipient instabilities in a glass modeled by a jammed packing of spheres. On approaching an instability, the frequency of a normal mode and the height of the energy barrier to cross into a new ground state both vanish. These instabilities produce a contribution to the density of vibrational states that scales as $ω^{3}$ at low frequencies $ω$ , and a contribution to the distribution of energy barriers $Δ H$ that scales as $Δ H^{- 1 / 3}$ at low barrier heights.

Received 4 April 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.215502

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Jamming

Glasses

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Ning Xu¹, Andrea J. Liu², and Sidney R. Nagel³

¹CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, People’s Republic of China
²Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA
³Department of Physics and James Franck and Enrico Fermi Institutes, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA