# Exploring the jamming transition over a wide range of critical densities

## TL;DR

This study investigates the jamming transition of frictionless polydisperse spheres across a broad range of densities, revealing new insights into structural properties, hyperuniformity deviations, and energy landscape changes at different scales.

## Contribution

It extends the range of studied jamming densities threefold, providing a comprehensive analysis of structural and critical behaviors over this wider spectrum.

## Key findings

- Isostaticity and critical pair correlation hold across all densities.
- Distorted icosahedral structures grow rapidly with volume fraction.
- Denser jammed states deviate more from hyperuniformity.

## Abstract

We numerically study the jamming transition of frictionless polydisperse spheres in three dimensions. We use an efficient thermalisation algorithm for the equilibrium hard sphere fluid and generate amorphous jammed packings over a range of critical jamming densities that is about three times broader than in previous studies. This allows us to reexamine a wide range of structural properties characterizing the jamming transition. Both isostaticity and the critical behavior of the pair correlation function hold over the entire range of jamming densities. At intermediate length scales, we find a weak, smooth increase of bond orientational order. By contrast, distorted icosahedral structures grow rapidly with increasing the volume fraction in both fluid and jammed states. Surprisingly, at large scale we observe that denser jammed states show stronger deviations from hyperuniformity, suggesting that the enhanced amorphous ordering inherited from the equilibrium fluid competes with, rather than enhances, hyperuniformity. Finally, finite size fluctuations of the critical jamming density are considerably suppressed in the denser jammed states, indicating an important change in the topography of the potential energy landscape. By considerably stretching the amplitude of the critical "J-line", our work disentangles physical properties at the contact scale that are associated with jamming criticality, from those occurring at larger length scales, which have a different nature.