Jamming in Systems With Quenched Disorder

TL;DR

This study investigates how quenched disorder affects jamming transitions in particle systems, revealing decreased jamming density, depinning thresholds, and a transition from plastic to elastic behavior, with implications for related disordered systems.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed numerical analysis of quenched disorder's impact on jamming, highlighting the transition from plastic to elastic depinning and the associated noise and transport changes.

Findings

Quenched disorder lowers the jamming density.

A depinning threshold appears with increasing disorder.

Transition from plastic to elastic depinning observed.

Abstract

We numerically study the effect of adding quenched disorder in the form of randomly placed pinning sites on jamming transitions in systems that jam at a well defined point J in the clean limit. Quenched disorder decreases the jamming density and introduces a depinning threshold. The onset of a finite threshold coincides with point J at the lowest pinning densities, but for higher pinning densities there is always a finite threshold even well below jamming. We find that proximity to point J strongly affects the transport curves and noise fluctuations, and observe a change from plastic behavior below jamming, where the system is highly heterogeneous, to elastic depinning above jamming. Many of the general features we find are related to other systems containing quenched disorder, including the peak effect observed in vortex systems.