Frictional granular matter: protocol dependence of mechanical properties

Abstract

Theoretical treatments of frictional granular matter often assume that it is legitimate to invoke classical elastic theory to describe its coarse-grained mechanical properties. Here, we show, based on experiments and numerical simulations, that this is generically not the case since stress autocorrelation functions decay more slowly than what is expected from elasticity theory. It was theoretically shown that standard elastic decay demands pressure and torque density fluctuations to be normal, with possibly one of them being hyperuniform. However, generic compressed frictional assemblies exhibit abnormal pressure fluctuations, failing to conform with the central limit theorem. The physics of this failure is linked to correlations built in the material during compression from a dilute configuration prior to jamming. By changing the protocol of compression, one can observe different pressure fluctuations, and stress autocorrelations decay at large scales.