Vibrational Spectrum of Granular Packings With Random Matrices

Abstract: The vibrational spectrum of granular packings can be used as a signature of the jamming transition, with the density of states at zero frequency becoming non-zero at the transition. It has been proposed previously that the vibrational spectrum of granular packings can be approximately obtained from random matrix theory. Here we show that although the density of states predicted by random matrix theory does not agree with certain aspects of dynamical numerical simulations, the correlations of the density of states, which---in contrast to the density of states---are expected to be universal, do show good agreement between dynamical numerical simulations of bead packs near the jamming point and the analytic predictions of the Laguerre orthogonal ensemble of random matrices. At the same time, there is clear disagreement with the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble. These findings establish that the Laguerre ensemble correctly reproduces the universal statistical properties of jammed granular matter and exclude the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble. We also present a random lattice model which is a physically motivated variant of the random matrix ensemble. Numerical calculations reveal that this model reproduces the known features of the vibrational density of states of granular matter, while also retaining the correlation structure seen in the Laguerre random matrix theory. We propose that the random lattice model can therefore be applied the understand not only the spectrum but more general properties of the vibration of bead packs including the spatial structure of modes both at the jamming point and far from it.