Variable-cell method for stress-controlled jamming of athermal, frictionless grains

Abstract: A new method is introduced to simulate jamming of polyhedral grains under controlled stress that incorporates global degrees of freedom through the metric tensor of a periodic cell containing grains. Jamming under hydrostatic/isotropic stress and athermal conditions leads to a precise definition of the ideal jamming point at zero shear stress. The structures of tetrahedra jammed hydrostatically exhibit less translational order and lower jamming-point density than previously described `maximally random jammed' hard tetrahedra. Under the same conditions, cubes jam with negligible nematic order. Grains with octahedral symmetry jam in the large-system limit with an abundance of face-face contacts in the absence of nematic order. For sufficiently large face-face contact number, percolating clusters form that span the entire simulation box. The response of hydrostatically jammed tetrahedra and cubes to shear-stress perturbation is also demonstrated with the variable-cell method.