Discontinuous rigidity transition associated with shear jamming in granular simulations.

We investigate the rigidity transition associated with shear jamming in frictionless, as well as frictional, disk packings in the quasi-static regime and at low shear rates. For frictionless disks, the transition under quasi-static shear is discontinuous, with an instantaneous emergence of a system spanning rigid clusters at the jamming transition. For frictional systems, the transition appears continuous for finite shear rates, but becomes sharper for lower shear rates. In the quasi-static limit, it is discontinuous as in the frictionless case. Thus, our results show that the rigidity transition associated with shear jamming is discontinuous, as demonstrated in the past for isotropic jamming of frictionless particles, and therefore a unifying feature of the jamming transition in general.

Criticality and marginal stability of the shear jamming transition of frictionless soft spheres.

We study numerically the critical behavior and marginal stability of the shear jamming transition for frictionless soft spheres, observed to occur over a finite range of densities, associated with isotropic jamming for densities above the minimum jamming (J-point) density. Several quantities are shown to scale near the shear jamming point in the same way as the isotropic jamming point. We compute the exponents associated with the small force distribution and the interparticle gap distribution and show that the corresponding exponents are consistent with the marginal stability condition observed for isotropic jamming and with predictions of the mean-field theory of jamming in hard spheres.

Dilatancy, shear jamming, and a generalized jamming phase diagram of frictionless sphere packings.

Granular packings display the remarkable phenomenon of dilatancy, wherein their volume increases upon shear deformation. Conventional wisdom and previous results suggest that dilatancy, also being the related phenomenon of shear-induced jamming, requires frictional interactions. Here, we show that the occurrence of isotropic jamming densities φj above the minimal density (or the J-point density) φJ leads both to the emergence of shear-induced jamming and dilatancy in frictionless packings. Under constant pressure shear, the system evolves into a steady-state at sufficiently large strains, whose density only depends on the pressure and is insensitive to the initial jamming density φj. In the limit of vanishing pressure, the steady-state exhibits critical behavior at φJ. While packings with different φj values display equivalent scaling properties under compression, they exhibit striking differences in rheological behaviour under shear. The yield stress under constant volume shear increases discontinuously with density when φj > φJ, contrary to the continuous behaviour in generic packings that jam at φJ. Our results thus lead to a more coherent, generalised picture of jamming in frictionless packings, which also have important implications on how dilatancy is understood in the context of frictional granular matter.