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arXiv · 1903.00991

Slow coarsening in jammed athermal soft particle suspensions

Rahul N. Chacko·Peter Sollich·Suzanne M. Fielding
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Abstract

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 non-trivial 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 localised and temporally intermittent `hot-spots' of non-affine 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 velocity correlation length increasing as a sublinear power law. Each individual spot however exists only transiently, within an overall picture of strongly intermittent dynamics.

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Rahul N. Chacko, Peter Sollich, Suzanne M. Fielding. 2019-03-03. Slow coarsening in jammed athermal soft particle suspensions. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.123.108001

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