2006/10/31 by T. S. Majmudar, Matthias Sperl, M. Sperl +4 · 5 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Granular flow and fluidized beds #Material Dynamics and Properties #Sports Dynamics and Biomechanics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.98.058001
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 058001 (2007). · 4 pages, 4 figures, 2 pages supplement; minor changes and clarifications, 2 addtl. refs., accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett
arxiv created 2006/12/18 · openalex publication_date 2007/01/29 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Recent simulations have predicted that near jamming for collections of spherical particles, there will be a discontinuous increase in the mean contact number Z at a critical volume fraction \ensuremathφc. Above \ensuremathφc, Z and the pressure P are predicted to increase as power laws in \ensuremathφ\ensuremath-\ensuremathφc. In experiments using photoelastic disks we corroborate a rapid increase in Z at \ensuremathφc and power-law behavior above \ensuremathφc for Z and P. Specifically we find a power-law increase as a function of \ensuremathφ\ensuremath-\ensuremathφc for Z\ensuremath-Zc with an exponent \ensuremathβ around 0.5, and for P with an exponent \ensuremathψ around 1.1. These exponents are in good agreement with simulations. We also find reasonable agreement with a recent mean-field theory for frictionless particles.