Spatial structure of states of self stress in jammed systems

Abstract

States of self stress, organizations of internal forces in many-body systems that are in equilibrium with an absence of external forces, can be thought of as the constitutive building blocks of the elastic response of a material. In overconstrained disordered packings they have a natural mathematical correspondence with the zero-energy vibrational modes in underconstrained systems. While substantial attention in the literature has been paid to diverging length scales associated with zero- and finite-energy vibrational modes in jammed systems, less is known about the spatial structure of the states of self stress. In this work we define a natural way in which a unique state of self stress can be associated with each bond in a disordered spring network derived from a jammed packing, and then investigate the spatial structure of these bond-localized states of self stress. This allows for an understanding of how the elastic properties of a system would change upon changing the strength or even existence of any bond in the system.