Amorphous materials as diverse as foams, emulsions, colloidal suspensions and granular
media can jam into a rigid, disordered state where they withstand finite shear stresses …

In 1989, Sir Sam Edwards made the visionary proposition to treat jammed granular materials
using a volume ensemble of equiprobable jammed states in analogy to thermal equilibrium …

Glasses have a large excess of low-frequency vibrational modes in comparison with most
crystalline solids. We show that such a feature is a necessary consequence of the weak …

We poorly understand the properties of amorphous systems at small length scales, where a
continuous elastic description breaks down. This is apparent when one considers their …

Glasses have an excess number of low-frequency vibrational modes in comparison with
most crystalline solids. We show that such a feature necessarily occurs in solids with low …

The statement of the title is shown by numerical simulation of homogeneously sheared
assemblies of frictionless, nearly rigid beads in the quasistatic limit. Results coincide for …

An ensemble approach for force distributions in static granular packings is developed. This
framework is based on the separation of packing and force scales, together with an a priori …

We present a systematic investigation of the distribution of normal forces at the boundaries
of static packings of spheres. A method for the efficient construction of large hexagonal-close …

The transmission of stress through a marginally stable granular pile in two dimensions is
exactly formulated in terms of a vector field of loop forces, and thence in terms of a single …

We study theoretically and numerically how hard frictionless particles in random packings
can rearrange. We demonstrate the existence of two distinct unstable non-linear modes of …