The jamming route to the glass state in weakly perturbed granular media

It has been suggested that a common conceptual framework known as 'jamming' (refs 1 and 2) may be used to classify a wide variety of physical systems; these include granular media, colloidal suspensions and glass-forming liquids, all of which display a critical slowdown in their dynamics before a sudden transition to an amorphous rigid state. Decreasing the relevant control parameter (such as temperature, drive or inverse density) may cause geometrical constraints to build up progressively and thus restrict the accessible part of the system's phase space. In glass-forming liquids (thermal molecular systems), jamming is provided by the classical vitrification process of supercooling, characterized by a rapidly increasing and apparently diverging viscosity at sufficiently low temperatures. In driven (athermal) macroscopic systems, a similar slowdown has been predicted to occur, notably in sheared foam or vibrated granular media. Here we report experimental evidence for dynamic behaviour, qualitatively analogous to supercooling, in a driven granular system of macroscopic millimetre-size particles. The granular medium is perturbed by isolated tapping or continuous vibration, with the perturbation intensity serving as a control parameter. We observe the random deflection of an immersed torsion oscillator that moves each time the grains rearrange, like a 'thermometer' sensing the granular noise. We caution that our granular analogy to supercooling is based on similarities in the dynamical behaviour, rather than quantitative theory.