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Material Witness

A jammy guess?

Nature Materials volume 15, page 1227 (2016)Cite this article

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Take a jar of sand, give it a shake and let it settle. The static configuration that results is a jammed state, in mechanical equilibrium thanks to contact between grains. It is disorderly, yet, unlike a fluid, it has a finite yield stress. It is of tremendous practical importance — jamming in powders can cause problems in industry and technology, and abrupt unjamming of granular piles may lead to avalanches — but it is still poorly understood.

A jammed state is a random close packing; for a large collection of grains, the number of distinct states of this sort is innumerable. How do these states compare? A framework for understanding jammed states was provided in the late 1980s by Sam Edwards, a pioneer of 'soft-matter' physics who died last year. With his student R. B. S. Oakeshott, he proposed the ansatz that all jammed packings are equally likely1. Edwards went on to formulate a picture of granular media, long before the subject became topical, based on the formation of 'force chains' of particles in contact, susceptible to large stress fluctuations.

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References

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  1. Philip Ball
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Ball, P. A jammy guess?. Nature Mater 15, 1227 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4817

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