Eur. Phys. J. E (2019) 42: 38
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2019-11802-3

Regular Article

The thermal jamming transition of soft harmonic disks in two dimensions

¹ Institut für Physikalische Chemie, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität (WWU), Corrensstr. 28/30, 48149, Münster, Germany
² Institut für Theoretische Physik I, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Staudtstraße 7, 91058, Erlangen, Germany

^* e-mail: michael.schmiedeberg@fau.de

Received: 18 December 2018
Accepted: 25 February 2019
Published online: 28 March 2019

Abstract

By exploring the properties of the energy landscape of a bidisperse system of soft harmonic disks in two dimensions we determine the thermal jamming transition. To be specific, we study whether the ground state of the system where the particles do not overlap can be reached within a reasonable time. Starting with random initial configurations, the energy landscape is probed by energy minimization steps as in case of athermal jamming and in addition steps where an energy barrier can be crossed with a small but non-zero probability. For random initial conditions we find that as a function of packing fraction the thermal jamming transition, i.e. the transition from a state where all overlaps can be removed to an effectively non-ergodic state where one cannot get rid of the overlaps, occurs at a packing fraction of , which is smaller than the transition packing fraction of athermal jamming at . Furthermore, we show that the thermal jamming transition is in the universality class of directed percolation and therefore is fundamentally different from the athermal jamming transition.