Title: A Statistical Ensemble for Soft Granular matter

Author (Poster): Silke Henkes, Brandeis University

Abstract:

Work on packings of soft spheres has shown the existence of a Jamming transition and has highlighted the need for a general statistical framework to describe granular packings. This work shows that for static granular packs, an ensemble formalism can be constructed by identifying the conserved quantities of the system. We focus on the trace of the stress tensor, which plays the role of energy in an ensemble that mirrors equilibrium statistical mechanics. We test the key predictions of the ensemble using distributions of mechanically stable packings of frictionless disks obtained from computer simulations.