Shear modulus of glasses: results from the full replica-symmetry-breaking solution.

Abstract

We compute the shear modulus of amorphous hard and soft spheres, using the exact solution in infinite spatial dimensions that has been developed recently. We characterize the behavior of this observable in the whole phase diagram, and in particular around the glass and jamming transitions. Our results are consistent with other theoretical approaches, which are unified within this general picture, and they are also consistent with numerical and experimental results. Furthermore, we discuss some properties of the out-of-equilibrium dynamics after a deep quench close to the jamming transition, and we show that a combined measure of the shear modulus and of the mean square displacement allows one to probe experimentally the complex structure of phase space predicted by the full replica-symmetry-breaking solution.