Energetic instability unjams sand and suspension.

Jamming is a phenomenon occurring in systems as diverse as traffic, colloidal suspensions, and granular materials. A theory on the reversible elastic deformation of jammed states is presented. First, an explicit granular stress-strain relation is derived that captures many relevant features of sand, including especially the Coulomb yield surface and a third-order jamming transition. Then this approach is generalized, and employed to consider jammed magnetorheological and electrorheological fluids, again producing results that compare well to experiments and simulations.