Jamming and replica symmetry breaking of weakly disordered crystals

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how small polydispersity affects the jamming transition in crystals, revealing a transition to replica symmetry breaking and scaling behaviors similar to amorphous solids, supported by analytical and numerical consistency.

Contribution

It introduces an analytically solvable model incorporating polydispersity and demonstrates the occurrence of replica symmetry breaking before jamming, aligning with recent simulations.

Findings

Replica symmetry remains stable in perfect crystals until jamming.

Finite polydispersity induces full RSB transition before jamming.

Model predicts vibrational density of states scaling near jamming.

Abstract

We discuss the physics of crystals with small polydispersity near the jamming transition point. For this purpose, we introduce an effective single-particle model taking into account the nearest neighbor structure of crystals. The model can be solved analytically by using the replica method in the limit of large dimensions. In the absence of polydispersity, the replica symmetric solution is stable until the jamming transition point, which leads to the standard scaling of perfect crystals. On the contrary, for finite polydispersity, the model undergoes the full replica symmetry breaking (RSB) transition before the jamming transition point. In the RSB phase, the model exhibits the same scaling as amorphous solids near the jamming transition point. These results are fully consistent with the recent numerical simulations of crystals with polydispersity. The simplicity of the model also allows us to derive the scaling behavior of the vibrational density of states that can be tested in future experiments and numerical simulations.