Jamming | Sussman Lab

Packings of soft spheres at zero temperature have long served as model disordered solids, as they possess a rigidity transition (at “point J”) in the absence of translational order and have a host of interesting properties as a function of density, frictional interactions, temperature, applied stress, and other control parameters. An early interest of ours was to investigate this model system under different boundary conditions. Amorphous solids with free surfaces in general display a number of intriguing phenomena. Both crystalline and amorphous nano-particles have unusual vibrational densities of states, in part due to their finite size and in part due to the heterogeneity of bond number and strength for particles as a function of distance from the surface. Shear banding and the failure modes of mesoscopic solid systems, such as nanopillars, have been an active area of research, and there again the free surfaces play a role in mediating the allowed failure modes. Perhaps most famousl

Packings of soft spheres at zero temperature have long served as model disordered solids, as they possess a rigidity transition (at “point J”) in the absence of translational order and have a host of interesting properties as a function of density, frictional interactions, temperature, applied stress, and other control parameters. An early interest of ours was to investigate this model system under different boundary conditions. Amorphous solids with free surfaces in general display a number of intriguing phenomena. Both crystalline and amorphous nano-particles have unusual vibrational densiti