Kabir Ramola

Numerical test of the Edwards conjecture shows that all packings are equally probable at jamming

A decades-old proposal that all distinct packings are equally probable in granular media has gone unproven due to the sheer number of packings involved. Numerical simulation now demonstrates that it holds — precisely at the jamming threshold. In the late 1980s, Sam Edwards proposed a possible statistical-mechanical framework to describe the properties of disordered granular materials1. A key assumption underlying the theory was that all jammed packings are equally likely. In the intervening years it has never been possible to test this bold hypothesis directly. Here we present simulations that provide direct evidence that at the unjamming point, all packings of soft repulsive particles are equally likely, even though generically, jammed packings are not. Typically, jammed granular systems are observed precisely at the unjamming point since grains are not very compressible. Our results therefore support Edwards’ original conjecture. We also present evidence that at unjamming the configurational entropy of the system is maximal.

Resonating valence bond wave functions and classical interacting dimer models.

We relate properties of nearest-neighbor resonating valence-bond (NNRVB) wave functions for SU(g) spin systems on two-dimensional bipartite lattices to those of fully packed interacting classical dimer models on the same lattice. The interaction energy can be expressed as a sum of n-body potentials V(n), which are recursively determined from the NNRVB wave function on finite subgraphs of the original lattice. The magnitude of the n-body interaction V(n) (n>1) is of order O(g(-(n-1))) for small g(-1). The leading term is a two-body nearest-neighbor interaction V2(g) favoring two parallel dimers on elementary plaquettes. For SU(2) spins, using our calculated value of V2(g=2), we find that the long-distance behavior of the bond-energy correlation function is dominated by an oscillatory term that decays as 1/|r|α with α≈1.22. This result is in remarkable quantitative agreement with earlier direct numerical studies of the corresponding wave function, which give α≈1.20.

Columnar order and Ashkin-Teller criticality in mixtures of hard squares and dimers.

We show that critical exponents of the transition to columnar order in a mixture of 2×1 dimers and 2×2 hard squares on the square lattice depends on the composition of the mixture in exactly the manner predicted by the theory of Ashkin-Teller criticality, including in the hard-square limit. This result settles the question regarding the nature of the transition in the hard-square lattice gas. It also provides the first example of a polydisperse system whose critical properties depend on composition. Our ideas also lead to some interesting predictions for a class of frustrated quantum magnets that exhibit columnar ordering of the bond energies at low temperature.

Spatial extent of branching Brownian motion.

We study the one-dimensional branching Brownian motion starting at the origin and investigate the correlation between the rightmost (X(max)≥0) and leftmost (X(min)≤0) visited sites up to time t. At each time step the existing particles in the system either diffuse (with diffusion constant D), die (with rate a), or split into two particles (with rate b). We focus on the regime b≤a where these two extreme values X(max) and X(min) are strongly correlated. We show that at large time t, the joint probability distribution function (PDF) of the two extreme points becomes stationary P(X,Y,t→∞)→p(X,Y). Our exact results for p(X,Y) demonstrate that the correlation between X(max) and X(min) is nonzero, even in the stationary state. From this joint PDF, we compute exactly the stationary PDF p(ζ) of the (dimensionless) span ζ=(X(max)-X(min))/√[D/b], which is the distance between the rightmost and leftmost visited sites. This span distribution is characterized by a linear behavior p(ζ)∼1/2(1+Δ)ζ for small spans, with Δ=(a/b-1). In the critical case (Δ=0) this distribution has a nontrivial power law tail p(ζ)∼8π√[3]/ζ(3) for large spans. On the other hand, in the subcritical case (Δ>0), we show that the span distribution decays exponentially as p(ζ)∼(A(2)/2)ζexp(-√[Δ]ζ) for large spans, where A is a nontrivial function of Δ, which we compute exactly. We show that these asymptotic behaviors carry the signatures of the correlation between X(max) and X(min). Finally we verify our results via direct Monte Carlo simulations.

Universal Order and Gap Statistics of Critical Branching Brownian Motion

We study the order statistics of one dimensional branching Brownian motion in which particles either diffuse (with diffusion constant

High-activity perturbation expansion for the hard square lattice gas

D

Classical Heisenberg spins on a hexagonal lattice with Kitaev couplings

), die (with rate

Disordered contact networks in jammed packings of frictionless disks

d

Scaling Theory for the Frictionless Unjamming Transition

) or split into two particles (with rate

Stress Response of Granular Systems

b