The jamming transition and new percolation universality classes in particulate systems with attraction

TL;DR

This paper investigates the jamming transition in attractive particulate systems, revealing new universality classes for percolation transitions influenced by force constraints, with implications for gelation phenomena.

Contribution

It identifies three distinct mechanical regimes and characterizes their critical transitions, showing they differ from lattice models and are relevant to experimental gelation.

Findings

Three regimes of mechanical behavior separated by two critical transitions.

Transitions belong to different universality classes than lattice counterparts.

Transitions are consistent at low temperatures and resemble gelation in colloidal systems.

Abstract

We numerically study the jamming transition in particulate systems with attraction by investigating their mechanical response at zero temperature. We find three regimes of mechanical behavior separated by two critical transitions--connectivity and rigidity percolation. The transitions belong to different universality classes than their lattice counterparts, due to force balance constraints. We also find that these transitions are unchanged at low temperatures and resemble gelation transitions in experiments on colloidal and silica gels.