Edwards Statistical Mechanics for Jammed Granular Matter

Understand

In 1989, Sir Sam Edwards made the visionary proposition to treat jammed granular materials using a volume ensemble of equiprobable jammed states in analogy to thermal equilibrium statistical mechanics, despite their inherent athermal features.

• Since then, the statistical mechanics approach for jammed matter has garnered an extraordinary amount of attention by both theorists and experimentalists.
• Here, we review a systematic approach to jammed matter based on the Edwards statistical mechanical ensemble.
• We discuss the construction of microcanonical and canonical ensembles based on the volume function, which replaces the Hamiltonian in jammed systems.