Paper detail

Jamming in Systems Composed of Frictionless Ellipse-Shaped Particles

We study the structural and mechanical properties of jammed ellipse packings, and find that the nature of the jamming transition in these systems is fundamentally different from that for spherical particles. Ellipse packings are generically hypostatic with more degrees of freedom than constraints. The spectra of low energy excitations possess two gaps and three distinct branches over a range of aspect ratios. In the zero compression limit, the energy of the modes in the lowest branch increases {\it quartically} with deformation amplitude, and the density of states possesses a $δ$-function at zero frequency. We identify scaling relations that collapse the low-frequency part of the spectra for different aspect ratios. Finally, we find that the degree of hypostaticity is determined by the number of quartic modes of the packing.