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The mechanical yield of dense granular materials is a fascinating rheological phenomenon, beyond which stress no longer increases with strain at a sufficiently large deformation. Understanding the behavior of mechanical responses associated with yielding is a fundamental goal in granular physics, and other related fields including glassy physics, material sciences, geophysics, and active matter biophysics. However, despite nearly half a century of theoretical efforts, the nature of yielding in amorphous solids remains largely elusive compared to its crystalline counterpart. Here, we experimentally investigate the mechanical responses of two-dimensional bidisperse jammed disks subjected to volume-invariant pure shear, focusing on the behavior of yielding. We show that the microscopic mechanical and geometrical features of configurations under shear can be characterized by two critical exponents of weak-force and small-gap distributions originally proposed for the isotropic jamming transition. We find that the yielding transition satisfies the condition of marginal mechanical stability through a scaling relationship between the two exponents, and after yielding global instability emerges. The criticality of yielding is revealed by a significant peak of susceptibility that quantifies the fluctuation of a glass overlap order parameter. Moreover, we find a distinct transition before yielding, which is associated with the onset of structural anisotropy.

Two drastically different theories predict the marginal criticality of jamming. The full replica symmetry breaking (fullRSB) theory [1-4] predicts the power-law distributions of weak contact forces and small inter-particle gaps in infinite-dimensional hard-sphere glass, with two nontrivial exponents $\theta_f=0.42311...$ and $\gamma=0.41269...$, respectively. While the marginal mechanical stability (MMS) analysis [5-8] predicts that the isostatic random packings of hard frictionless spheres under external stress are marginally stable and provides inequality relationships for the exponents of the weak-force and inter-particle-gap distributions. Here we measure precisely contact forces and particle positions in isotropic jammed bidisperse photoelastic disks and find the clear power-law distributions of weak forces and small inter-particle gaps, with both exponents $\theta_f=0.44(2)$ and $\gamma = 0.43(3) $ in an excellent agreement with the fullRSB theory. As the jammed packing subject to area-conserved cyclic pure shear approaches the yielding point, the two exponents change substantially from those of the isotropic case but they still satisfy the scaling relationship provided by the MMS argument. Our results provide strong experimental evidences for the robustness of the infinite-dimensional theory and the MMS analysis in real-world amorphous materials., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures

The concept of mechanical screening is widely applied in solid-state systems. Examples include nucleation of defects in crystalline materials, scars and pleats in curved crystals, wrinkles in strongly confined thin sheets, and cell-rearrangements in biological tissue. Available theories of such screening usually contain a crucial ingredient, which is the existence of an ordered reference state, with respect to which screening elements nucleate to release stresses. In contradistinction, amorphous materials in which a unique reference state does not exist, nevertheless exhibits plastic events that act as screening geometric charges with significant implications on the mechanical response. In a recent paper [Phys. Rev. E 104, 024904] it was proposed that mechanical strains in amorphous solids can be either weakly or strongly screened by the formation of low or high density of plastic events. At low densities the screening effect is reminiscent of the role of dipoles in dielectrics, in only renormalizing the elastic moduli. The effect of high density screening has no immediate electrostatic analog and is expected to change qualitatively the mechanical response, as seen for example in the displacement field. On the basis of experiments and simulations, we show that in granular matter, strong screening results in significant deviation from elasticity theory. The theoretical analysis, which accounts for an emergent inherent length scale, the experimental measurements and the numerical simulations of frictional granular amorphous assemblies are in agreement with each other, and provide a strong support for the novel continuum theory.

Experimental measurements of contact forces are limited to spheres and disks in three and two dimensions, making the evaluation of the shape effect and universality of force distributions and the comparison between experiments and theories extremely difficult. Here we present precise measurements of vector contact forces in photoelastic ellipses and disks subject to isotropic compression and pure shear. We find the local, instead of the global, stress ratio, control the width of the force distributions for forces larger than the mean, regardless of the particle shape and preparation protocols. By taking advantage of the anisotropic particle shape, we can determine the anisotropic growth of contacts in ellipses subject to isotropic compression, revealing the role of non-affine particle motions in homogenizing force distributions. Our results uncover the role of local anisotropy in the statistical framework of granular materials and open a new regime of exploring the role of particle shape on the mechanical and dynamical properties of granular materials in depth., Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures

The origin of boson peak -- an excess of density of states over Debye's model in glassy solids -- is still under intense debate, among which some theories and experiments suggest that boson peak is related to van-Hove singularity. Here we show that boson peak and van-Hove singularity are well separated identities, by measuring the vibrational density of states of a two-dimensional granular system, where packings are tuned gradually from a crystalline, to polycrystals, and to an amorphous material. We observe a coexistence of well separated boson peak and van-Hove singularities in polycrystals, in which the van-Hove singularities gradually shift to higher frequency values while broadening their shapes and eventually disappear completely when the structural disorder $\eta$ becomes sufficiently high. By analyzing firstly the strongly disordered system ($\eta=1$) and the disordered granular crystals ($\eta=0$), and then systems of intermediate disorder with $\eta$ in between, we find that boson peak is associated with spatially uncorrelated random flucutations of shear modulus $\delta G/\langle G \rangle$ whereas the smearing of van-Hove singularities is associated with spatially correlated fluctuations of shear modulus $\delta G/\langle G \rangle$., Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures