# An exploratory study of the glassy landscape near jamming

## TL;DR

This paper investigates the complex energy landscape of athermal soft spheres near the jamming transition, revealing a hierarchical structure and its implications for thermodynamic properties.

## Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of the landscape structure of soft spheres near jamming, highlighting the hierarchical organization and its effect on system behavior.

## Key findings

- Number of configurations increases steeply near jamming
- Hierarchical landscape structure emerges close to transition
- Predicts thermodynamic observables at the transition edge

## Abstract

We present the study of the landscape structure of athermal soft spheres both as a function of the packing fraction and of the energy. We find that, on approaching the jamming transition, the number of different configurations available to the system has a steep increase and that a hierarchical organization of the landscape emerges. We use the knowledge of the structure of the landscape to predict the values of thermodynamic observables on the edge of the transition.