Elasticity of jammed packings of sticky disks

Abstract

Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at a high packing fraction. This nonequilibrium phase transition is best understood in a model system where particles repel when they overlap. Recently, however, it was shown that introducing any finite amount of attraction between particles changes the universality class of the transition. The properties of this "sticky jamming"class remain almost entirely unexplored. We use molecular dynamics simulations and scaling analysis to determine the shear modulus, bulk modulus, and coordination of marginal solids close to the sticky jamming point. Each observable differs not just quantitatively but also qualitatively from the purely repulsive case.