Vibrational properties of two-dimensional dimer packings near the jamming transition

Abstract: Jammed particulate systems composed of various shapes of particles undergo the jamming transition as they are compressed or decompressed. To date, sphere packings have been extensively studied in many previous works, where isostaticity at the transition and scaling laws with the pressure of various quantities, including the contact number and the vibrational density of states, have been established. Additionally, much attention has been paid to nonspherical packings, and particularly recent work has made progress in understanding ellipsoidal packings. In the present work, we study the dimer packings in two dimensions, which have been much less understood than systems of spheres and ellipsoids. We first study the contact number of dimers near the jamming transition. It turns out that packings of dimers have "rotational rattlers", each of which still has a free rotational motion. After correcting this effect, we show that dimers become isostatic at the jamming, and the excess contact number obeys the same critical law and finite size scaling law as those of spheres. We next study the vibrational properties of dimers near the transition. We find that the vibrational density of states of dimers exhibits two characteristic plateaus that are separated by a peak. The high-frequency plateau is dominated by the translational degree of freedom, while the low-frequency plateau is dominated by the rotational degree of freedom. We establish the critical scaling laws of the characteristic frequencies of the plateaus and the peak near the transition. In addition, we present detailed characterizations of the real space displacement fields of vibrational modes in the translational and rotational plateaus.