The yielding of granular matter is marginally stable and critical

TL;DR

This study experimentally investigates the yielding behavior of dense granular materials, revealing criticality, marginal stability, and structural anisotropy transitions, with implications for understanding amorphous solid mechanics.

Contribution

It provides the first experimental evidence linking microscopic critical exponents to the marginal stability and criticality of yielding in granular matter.

Findings

Yielding satisfies marginal stability conditions via critical exponents.

A peak in susceptibility indicates critical behavior at yielding.

Structural anisotropy onset occurs before yielding.

Abstract

The mechanical yield of dense granular materials is a fascinating rheological phenomenon, beyond which stress no longer increases with strain at a sufficiently large deformation. Understanding the behavior of mechanical responses associated with yielding is a fundamental goal in granular physics, and other related fields including glassy physics, material sciences, geophysics, and active matter biophysics. However, despite nearly half a century of theoretical efforts, the nature of yielding in amorphous solids remains largely elusive compared to its crystalline counterpart. Here, we experimentally investigate the mechanical responses of two-dimensional bidisperse jammed disks subjected to volume-invariant pure shear, focusing on the behavior of yielding. We show that the microscopic mechanical and geometrical features of configurations under shear can be characterized by two critical exponents of weak-force and small-gap distributions originally proposed for the isotropic jamming transition. We find that the yielding transition satisfies the condition of marginal mechanical stability through a scaling relationship between the two exponents, and after yielding global instability emerges. The criticality of yielding is revealed by a significant peak of susceptibility that quantifies the fluctuation of a glass overlap order parameter. Moreover, we find a distinct transition before yielding, which is associated with the onset of structural anisotropy.