Slow Coarsening in Jammed Athermal Soft Particle Suspensions

We simulate a densely jammed, athermal assembly of repulsive soft particles immersed in a solvent. Starting from an initial condition corresponding to a quench from a high temperature, we find nontrivial slow dynamics driven by a gradual release of stored elastic energy, with the root mean squared p...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2019-09, Vol.123 (10), p.108001, Article 108001
Main Authors: Chacko, R. N., Sollich, P., Fielding, S. M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Amorphous materials
Assembly
Coarsening
Decay rate
High temperature
Particle decay
Power law
Velocity distribution
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Summary:We simulate a densely jammed, athermal assembly of repulsive soft particles immersed in a solvent. Starting from an initial condition corresponding to a quench from a high temperature, we find nontrivial slow dynamics driven by a gradual release of stored elastic energy, with the root mean squared particle speed decaying as a power law in time with a fractional exponent. This decay is accompanied by the presence within the assembly of spatially localized and temporally intermittent "hot spots" of nonaffine deformation, connected by long-ranged swirls in the velocity field, reminiscent of the local plastic events and long-ranged elastic propagation that have been intensively studied in sheared amorphous materials. The pattern of hot spots progressively coarsens, with the hot-spot size and separation slowly growing over time, and the associated correlation length in particle speed increasing as a sublinear power law. Each individual spot, however, exists only transiently within an overall picture of strongly intermittent dynamics.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.108001