Differences in plasticity between hard and soft spheres

Abstract

This paper shows that soft and hard spheres exhibit qualitatively and quantitatively different behavior under shear. These differences occur because the network of contacts in hard spheres changes precisely when the system traverses a saddle point, while contact changes are much more frequent in soft spheres. Moreover, the scaling relations associated with nonlinear saddle points in soft spheres are similar to scaling relations found previously for the linear response of soft spheres.