Experimental measurement of an effective temperature for jammed granular materials

A densely packed granular system is an example of an out-of-equilibrium system in the jammed state. It has been a longstanding problem to determine whether this class of systems can be described by concepts arising from equilibrium statistical mechanics, such as an ``effective temperature'' and ``compactivity''. The measurement of the effective temperature is realized in the laboratory by slowly shearing a closely-packed ensemble of spherical beads confined by an external pressure in a Couette geometry. All the probe particles considered in this study, independent of their characteristic features, equilibrate at the same temperature, given by the packing density of the system.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, more informations at http://www.jamlab.or

Calculation of the Voronoi boundary for lens-shaped particles and spherocylinders

We have recently developed a mean-field theory to estimate the packing fraction of non-spherical particles [A. Baule et al., Nature Commun. (2013)]. The central quantity in this framework is the Voronoi excluded volume, which generalizes the standard hard-core excluded volume appearing in Onsager's theory. The Voronoi excluded volume is defined from an exclusion condition for the Voronoi boundary between two particles, which is usually not tractable analytically. Here, we show how the technical difficulties in calculating the Voronoi boundary can be overcome for lens-shaped particles and spherocylinders, two standard prolate and oblate shapes with rotational symmetry. By decomposing these shapes into unions and intersections of spheres analytical expressions can be obtained.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Fluctuations and the Effective Moduli of an Isotropic, Random Aggregate of Identical, Frictionless Spheres

We consider a random aggregate of identical frictionless elastic spheres that has first been subjected to an isotropic compression and then sheared. We assume that the average strain provides a good description of how stress is built up in the initial isotropic compression. However, when calculating the increment in the displacement between a typical pair of contaction particles due to the shearing, we employ force equilibrium for the particles of the pair, assuming that the average strain provides a good approximation for their interactions with their neighbors. The incorporation of these additional degrees of freedom in the displacement of a typical pair relaxes the system, leading to a decrease in the effective moduli of the aggregate. The introduction of simple models for the statistics of the ordinary and conditional averages contributes an additional decrease in moduli. The resulting value of the shear modulus is in far better agreement with that measured in numerical simulations

Unexpected Density Fluctuations in Jammed Disordered Sphere Packings

We computationally study jammed disordered hard-sphere packings as large as a million particles. We show that the packings are saturated and hyperuniform, i.e., that local density fluctuations grow only as a logarithmically-augmented surface area rather than the volume of the window. The structure factor shows an unusual non-analytic linear dependence near the origin, $S(k)\sim|k|$. In addition to exponentially damped oscillations seen in liquids, this implies a weak power-law tail in the total correlation function, $h(r)\sim-r^{-4}$, and a long-ranged direct correlation function.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Large cities are less green

We study how urban quality evolves as a result of carbon dioxide emissions as urban agglomerations grow. We employ a bottom-up approach combining two unprecedented microscopic data on population and carbon dioxide emissions in the continental US. We first aggregate settlements that are close to each other into cities using the City Clustering Algorithm (CCA) defining cities beyond the administrative boundaries. Then, we use data on $\rm{CO}_2$ emissions at a fine geographic scale to determine the total emissions of each city. We find a superlinear scaling behavior, expressed by a power-law, between $\rm{CO}_2$ emissions and city population with average allometric exponent $\beta = 1.46$ across all cities in the US. This result suggests that the high productivity of large cities is done at the expense of a proportionally larger amount of emissions compared to small cities. Furthermore, our results are substantially different from those obtained by the standard administrative definition of cities, i.e. Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Specifically, MSAs display isometric scaling emissions and we argue that this discrepancy is due to the overestimation of MSA areas. The results suggest that allometric studies based on administrative boundaries to define cities may suffer from endogeneity bias