Dilatancy, shear jamming, and a generalized jamming phase diagram of frictionless sphere packings.

Abstract

Granular packings display the remarkable phenomenon of dilatancy, wherein their volume increases upon shear deformation. Conventional wisdom and previous results suggest that dilatancy, also being the related phenomenon of shear-induced jamming, requires frictional interactions. Here, we show that the occurrence of isotropic jamming densities φj above the minimal density (or the J-point density) φJ leads both to the emergence of shear-induced jamming and dilatancy in frictionless packings. Under constant pressure shear, the system evolves into a steady-state at sufficiently large strains, whose density only depends on the pressure and is insensitive to the initial jamming density φj. In the limit of vanishing pressure, the steady-state exhibits critical behavior at φJ. While packings with different φj values display equivalent scaling properties under compression, they exhibit striking differences in rheological behaviour under shear. The yield stress under constant volume shear increases discontinuously with density when φj > φJ, contrary to the continuous behaviour in generic packings that jam at φJ. Our results thus lead to a more coherent, generalised picture of jamming in frictionless packings, which also have important implications on how dilatancy is understood in the context of frictional granular matter.