Physics – Condensed Matter – Soft Condensed Matter
Scientific paper
2006-01-03
Nature 439, 828 (2006)
Physics
Condensed Matter
Soft Condensed Matter
15 pages, 4 figures; to appear in Nature
Scientific paper
10.1038/nature04549
Force networks form the skeleton of static granular matter. They are the key ingredient to mechanical properties, such as stability, elasticity and sound transmission, which are of utmost importance for civil engineering and industrial processing. Previous studies have focused on the global structure of external forces (the boundary condition), and on the probability distribution of individual contact forces. The disordered spatial structure of the force network, however, has remained elusive so far. Here we report evidence for scale invariance of clusters of particles that interact via relatively strong forces. We analyzed granular packings generated by molecular dynamics simulations mimicking real granular matter; despite the visual variation, force networks for various values of the confining pressure and other parameters have identical scaling exponents and scaling function, and thus determine a universality class. Remarkably, the flat ensemble of force configurations--a simple generalization of equilibrium statistical mechanics--belongs to the same universality class, while some widely studied simplified models do not.
Nienhuis Bernard
Ostojic Srdjan
Somfai Ellak
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