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In this talk I will first present results from a detailed analysis of the number of contact, the properties of the contact, and the normal and tangential forces at contact for a set of mechanically stable sphere packing from experiments and simulations. I'll then discuss the link between the observed average coordination number per bead and the isostatic limit both locally and globally. I'll also show that, by using of a simple statistical mechanics approach, one can describe accurately the observed distribution of the number of contacts per bead. Interestingly, this statistical mechanics approach can be simply extended to arbitrary dimensions potentially providing information on the expected coordination of higher dimensional disordered structures. From this approach, speculations about mechanical stability and jamming in dimensions different than two and three can be drawn. |
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