Origin of Noncubic Scaling Law in Disordered Granular Packing

Chengjie Xia (1) , Jindong Li (1) , Binquan Kou (1) , Yixin Cao (1) , Zhifeng Li (1) , Xianghui Xiao (2) , Yanan Fu (3) , Tiqiao Xiao (4) , Liang Hong (1, 5) , Jie Zhang (5, 1) , Walter Kob (6) , Yujie Wang (1, 7)

1 Department of Physics and Astronomy [Shanghai]
2 APS - Advanced Photon Source [ANL]
3 SIAP - Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics
4 UCAS - University of Chinese Academy of Sciences [Beijing]
5 Shanghai Jiao Tong University [Shanghai]
6 L2C - Laboratoire Charles Coulomb
7 Shangaï Jiao Tong University [Shangaï]

Recent diffraction experiments on metallic glasses have unveiled an unexpected non-cubic scaling 14 law between density and average interatomic distance, which lead to the speculations on the presence of 15 fractal glass order. Using X-ray tomography we identify here a similar non-cubic scaling law in 16 disordered granular packing of spherical particles. We find that the scaling law is directly related to the 17 contact neighbors within first nearest neighbor shell, and therefore is closely connected to the 18 phenomenon of jamming. The seemingly universal scaling exponent around 2.5 arises due to the isostatic 19 condition with contact number around 6, and we argue that the exponent should not be universal. .

Domaines: Mécanique statistique [cond-mat.stat-mech]; Systèmes désordonnés et réseaux de neurones [cond-mat.dis-nn]

Chengjie Xia, Jindong Li, Binquan Kou, Yixin Cao, Zhifeng Li, et al.. Origin of Noncubic Scaling Law in Disordered Granular Packing. Physical Review Letters, 2017, 118, pp.238002. ⟨10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.238002⟩. ⟨hal-01536101⟩