Department of Physics Papers
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of this Version
2-26-2016
Publication Source
Physical Review Letters
Volume
116
Issue
8
Start Page
088001-1
Last Page
088001-5
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.088001
Abstract
Characterizing structural inhomogeneity is an essential step in understanding the mechanical response of amorphous materials. We introduce a threshold-free measure based on the field of vectors pointing from the center of each particle to the centroid of the Voronoi cell in which the particle resides. These vectors tend to point in toward regions of high free volume and away from regions of low free volume, reminiscent of sinks and sources in a vector field. We compute the local divergence of these vectors, where positive values correspond to overpacked regions and negative values identify underpacked regions within the material. Distributions of this divergence are nearly Gaussian with zero mean, allowing for structural characterization using only the moments of the distribution. We explore how the standard deviation and skewness vary with the packing fraction for simulations of bidisperse systems and find a kink in these moments that coincides with the jamming transition.
Copyright/Permission Statement
© 2016 American Physical Society. You can view the original article at: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.088001
Keywords
Research areas, structural properties, physical systems, amorphous materials, packing and jamming problems, condensed matter, material physics
Recommended Citation
Rieser, J. M., Goodrich, C. P., Liu, A. J., & Durian, D. J. (2016). Divergence of Voronoi Cell Anisotropy Vector: A Threshold-Free Characterization of Local Structure in Amorphous Materials. Physical Review Letters, 116 (8), 088001-1-088001-5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.088001
Date Posted: 13 October 2017
This document has been peer reviewed.