Collective excitations in jammed states: ultrafast defect propagation and finite-size scaling

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework to understand collective excitations in highly jammed particle systems, revealing their generation, propagation, and impact on system size-dependent jamming behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to analyze complex many-particle transition states and explains the scaling of particle currents in dense nonequilibrium systems.

Findings

Derived generation rates and velocities of collective excitations.

Explained the size-dependent apparent jamming transition.

Identified a scaling law for particle currents in different system sizes.

Abstract

In crowded systems, particle currents can be mediated by propagating collective excitations which are generated as rare events, are localized and have a finite lifetime. The theoretical description of such excitations is hampered by the problem of identifying complex many-particle transition states, calculation of their free energies, and the evaluation of propagation mechanisms and velocities. Here we show that these problems can be tackled for a highly jammed system of hard spheres in a periodic potential. We derive generation rates of collective excitations, their anomalously high velocities, explain the occurrence of an apparent jamming transition and its strong dependence on the system size. The particle currents follow a scaling behavior, where for small systems the current is proportional to the generation rate and for large systems given by the geometric mean of the generation rate and velocity. Our theoretical approach is widely applicable to dense nonequilibrium systems in confined geometries. It provides new perspectives for studying dynamics of collective excitations in experiments.