Disordered surface vibrations in jammed sphere packings - Sussman, Daniel M.; Goodrich, Carl Peter; Liu, Andrea J.; Nagel, Sidney R. (Soft Matter, 2015)
We study the vibrational properties near a free surface of disordered spring networks derived from jammed sphere packings. In bulk systems, without surfaces, it is well understood that such systems have a plateau in the density of vibrational modes extending down to a frequency scale ω*. This frequency is controlled by ΔZ = 〈Z〉 − 2d, the difference between the average coordination of the spheres and twice the spatial dimension, d, of the system, which vanishes at the jamming transition. In the presence of a free surface we find that there is a density of disordered vibrational modes associated with the surface that extends far below ω*. The total number of these low-frequency surface modes is controlled by ΔZ, and the profile of their decay into the bulk has two characteristic length scales, which diverge as ΔZ−1/2 and ΔZ−1 as the jamming transition is approached.
published
yes
yes
Keywords: article