Former postdoctoral associate Peter Morse, former graduate student Sven Wijtmans, and Lisa Manning worked with Martin Van Hecke’s lab to understand how contact changes correlate with plasticity in jammed soft spheres.  We found that contact changes are not one-to-one with plastic events, even in the limit of zero pressure. This is interesting because in hard spheres those two types of events always occur together.  We also show that the statistics of nonlinear plastic events show the same scaling as the linear response, again highlighting the zero-pressure limit is singular.

Peter Morse, Merlijn van Deen, Sven Wijtmans, Martin Van Hecke, M. L. Manning, “Two classes of events in sheared particulate matter,”  Physical Review Research 2 023179, https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.023179 arXiv:1907.10198 (2020).