Discontinuous rigidity transition associated with shear jamming in granular simulations

Abstract: We investigate the rigidity transition associated with shear jamming in frictionless, as well as frictional, disk packings in the quasi-static regime and at low shear rates. For frictionless disks, the transition is under quasistatic shear is discontinuous, with an instantaneous emergence of a system spanning rigid cluster at the jamming transition. For frictional systems, the transition appears continuous for finite shear rates, but becomes sharper for lower shear rates. In the quasi-static limit, it is discontinuous as in the frictionless case. Thus, our results show that the rigidity transition associated with shear jamming is discontinuous, as demonstrated in a past for isotropic jamming of frictionless particles, and therefore a unifying feature of the jamming transition in general.