Excitation of vibrational soft modes in disordered systems using active oscillation

Abstract

We propose a new method to characterize the spatial distribution of particles' vibrations in solids with much lower computational costs compared to the usual normal mode analysis. We excite the specific vibrational mode in a two dimensional athermal jammed system by giving a small amplitude of active oscillation to each particle's size with an identical driving frequency. The response is then obtained as the real time displacements of the particles. We show remarkable correlations between the real time displacements and the eigen vectors obtained from conventional normal mode analysis. More importantly, from these real time displacements, we can measure the participation ratio and spatial polarization of particles' vibrations. From these measurements, we find three distinct frequency regimes which characterize the spatial distribution and correlation of particles' vibrations in jammed amorphous solids. Furthermore, we can possibly apply this method to a much larger system to examine the low frequency behaviour of amorphous solids with a much higher resolution of the frequency space.