Reply to Comment on `What Determines the Static Force Chains in Stressed Granular Media?'

Abstract

The formalism proposed in Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 078001 (2016) for determination of the normal and tangential inter-particle forces in frictional disks from visual data was criticized in a comment to that paper. However the theory developed in the original publication is aimed at finding the forces when provided with accurate measurements while the comment addresses a different problem, being the statistics of forces in a configuration with uncertainty of the relevant parameters. We address this difference in perspectives and point out that even with experimental errors one can improve the results using an iterative procedure proposed in Phys. Rev. E. Rapid Communication, 93, 060601(R) (2016).