Breakdown of elasticity theory for jammed hard-particle packings: conical nonlinear constitutive theory (Q1434674)

The purpose is to show that the responce of jammed hard-particle packings to global deformations cannot be generally described by linear elasticity, but involves a well-defined alternative formalism. Although the authors specialize in hard circular disks in two dimensions and hard spheres in three dimensions, the general conclusions of this paper apply as well to hard particles of arbitrary shape. The authors investigate conditions under which a packing can be considered to ``incompressible'' in the traditional sense. Moreover, they discuss conical nonlinear constitutive theory for general packings, which include the important cases of noncrystalline packings and packings containing distinct particle species.