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From creep to flow: Granular materials under cyclic shear

Granular materials such as sand, powders, and grains are omnipresent in daily life, industrial applications, and earth-science [1]. When unperturbed, they form stable structures that resemble the ones of other amorphous solids like metallic and colloidal glasses [2]. It is commonly conjectured that all these amorphous materials show a universal mechanical response when sheared slowly, i.e., to have an elastic regime, followed by yielding [3]. Here we use X-ray tomography to determine the microscopic dynamics of a cyclically sheared granular system in three dimensions. Independent of the shear amplitude $Γ$, the sample shows a cross-over from creep to diffusive dynamics, indicating that granular materials have no elastic response and always yield, in stark contrast to other glasses. The overlap function [4] reveals that at large $Γ$ yielding is a simple cross-over phenomenon, while for small $Γ$ it shows features of a first order transition with a critical point at $Γ\approx 0.1$ at which one finds a pronounced slowing down and dynamical heterogeneity. Our findings are directly related to the surface roughness of granular particles which induces a micro-corrugation to the potential energy landscape, thus creating relaxation channels that are absent in simple glasses. These processes must be understood for reaching an understanding of the complex relaxation dynamics of granular systems.