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Nonlinear dynamics

Jamming is not just cool any more

Nature volume 396, pages 21–22 (1998)Cite this article

All around us, things seem to be getting jammed. We travel on a highway and we are caught in traffic jams. At the wholefoods counter, grains and beans jam as they refuse to flow out of the bottom of the hopper into our bags. In factories, powdered raw materials clog the conduits that were designed to carry them smoothly. Our recourse in all these situations is to pound on our conduits, hoppers and dashboards until the jam miraculously disappears. We are usually so irritated that we have not really noticed that the jammed state, in all of these situations, has common properties. For example, the vibrations from the pounding actually do some good in reinitiating flow — except in the case of the traffic jam. Does the jammed solid then have different properties from the solids we normally encounter in the laboratory?

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Figure 1: A possible phase diagram for jamming.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, 90095-1569, California, USA

    Andrea J. Liu

  2. The James Franck Institute and the Department of Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, 60637, Illinois, USA

    Sidney R. Nagel

Authors
  1. Andrea J. Liu
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  2. Sidney R. Nagel
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Liu, A., Nagel, S. Jamming is not just cool any more. Nature 396, 21–22 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/23819

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