Comment on "Effects of Point Defects on the Phase Diagram of Vortex States in High-Tc Superconductors in the B || c Axis"

We comment on a recent work by Nonomura and Hu who simulated the 3D XY model for a type-II superconductor in an applied magnetic field, in the presence of uncorrelated point randomness. We clarify the nature of the "vortex slush" state that they found, and argue that this state is unstable in the thermodynamic limit.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figure

Statistics of Conserved Quantities in Mechanically Stable Packings of Frictionless Disks Above Jamming

We numerically simulate mechanically stable packings of soft-core, frictionless, bidisperse disks in two dimensions, above the jamming packing fraction $\phi_J$. For configurations with a fixed isotropic global stress tensor, we compute the averages, variances, and correlations of conserved quantities (stress $\Gamma_{\cal C}$, force-tile area $A_{\cal C}$, Voronoi volume $V_{\cal C}$, number of particles $N_{\cal C}$, and number of small particles $N_{s{\cal C}}$) on compact subclusters of particles ${\cal C}$, as a function of the cluster size and the global system stress. We find several significant differences depending on whether the cluster ${\cal C}$ is defined by a fixed radius $R$ or a fixed number of particles $M$. We comment on the implications of our findings for maximum entropy models of jammed packings.Comment: 11 pages, 19 figure

Glassiness, Rigidity and Jamming of Frictionless Soft Core Disks

The jamming of bi-disperse soft core disks is considered, using a variety of different protocols to produce the jammed state. In agreement with other works, we find that cooling and compression can lead to a broad range of jamming packing fractions $\phi_J$, depending on cooling rate and initial configuration; the larger the degree of big particle clustering in the initial configuration, the larger will be the value of $\phi_J$. In contrast, we find that shearing disrupts particle clustering, leading to a much narrower range of $\phi_J$ as the shear strain rate varies. In the limit of vanishingly small shear strain rate, we find a unique non-trivial value for the jamming density that is independent of the initial system configuration. We conclude that shear driven jamming is a unique and well defined critical point in the space of shear driven steady states. We clarify the relation between glassy behavior, rigidity and jamming in such systems and relate our results to recent experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, significantly expanded version as accepted for publication in PR