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Anomalous excitations of
jammed-together particles.The arrangement of grains in a static sandpile is
dictated by kinetics. The
particles are mutually trapped in the first stable configuration they
encounter. Glassy materials
share this quenched or jammed character. Both systems share another property: a great excess of
slow vibrational modes. The
recent simulation of marginal jamming by the Nagel group shows a constant
density of modes extending to zero frequency, in qualitative contrast to the
density of acoustic modes of an elastic solid. This behavior forces us to ask: "What is the
counterpart of acoustic modes in a marginally jammed solid?" This talk describes a theory of these
anomalous modes by Matthieu Wyart, Sidney Nagel and T. Witten. A variational argument shows that any
minimally-connected (isostatic) solid must have a nonzero density of
extended, lowest-frequency modes.
We account for the observed crossover to ordinary solid behavior with
increasing compression and connectivity. We comment on the implications of these modes for
molecular glasses.
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