Thermal fluctuations, mechanical response, and hyperuniformity in jammed solids

TL;DR

This study investigates how thermal fluctuations influence the mechanical and structural properties of jammed solids, revealing equilibrium-like fluctuation relations, diverging correlation lengths, and hyperuniformity robustness near the jamming transition.

Contribution

It demonstrates that equilibrium fluctuation-dissipation relations hold near jamming and links hyperuniformity to structural features independent of thermal fluctuations.

Findings

Fluctuation-dissipation relations are valid near jamming.

Correlation lengths diverge as jamming is approached.

Hyperuniformity persists despite temperature and density changes.

Abstract

Jamming is a geometric phase transition occurring in dense particle systems in the absence of temperature. We use computer simulations to analyse the effect of thermal fluctuations on several signatures of the transition. We show that scaling laws for bulk and shear moduli only become relevant when thermal fluctuations are extremely small, and propose their relative ratio as a quantitative signature of jamming criticality. Despite the nonequilibrium nature of the transition, we find that thermally induced fluctuations and mechanical responses obey equilibrium fluctuation-dissipation relations near jamming, provided the appropriate fluctuating component of the particle displacements is analysed. This shows that mechanical moduli can be directly measured from particle positions in mechanically unperturbed packings, and suggests that the definition of a "nonequilibrium index" is unnecessary for amorphous materials. We find that fluctuations of particle displacements are spatially correlated, and define a transverse and a longitudinal correlation lengthscales which both diverge as the jamming transition is approached. We analyse the frozen component of density fluctuations and find that it displays signatures of nearly-hyperuniform behaviour at large lengthscales. This demonstrates that hyperuniformity in jammed packings is unrelated to a vanishing compressibility and explains why it appears remarkably robust against temperature and density variations. Differently from jamming criticality, obstacles preventing the observation of hyperuniformity in colloidal systems do not originate from thermal fluctuations.