Herschel-Bulkley Shearing Rheology Near the Athermal Jamming Transition

Abstract

We consider the rheology of soft-core frictionless disks in two dimensions in the neighborhood of the athermal jamming transition. From numerical simulations of bidisperse, overdamped particles, we argue that the divergence of the viscosity below jamming is characteristic of the hard-core limit, independent of the particular soft-core interaction. We develop a mapping from soft-core to hard-core particles that recovers all the critical behavior found in earlier scaling analyses. Using this mapping we derive a relation that gives the exponent of the nonlinear Herschel-Bulkley rheology above jamming in terms of the exponent of the diverging viscosity below jamming.