Universal stress correlations in crystalline and amorphous packings

Abstract

We present a universal characterization of stress correlations in athermal systems, across crystalline to amorphous packings. Via numerical analysis of static configurations of particles interacting through harmonic as well as Lennard-Jones potentials, for a variety of preparation protocols and ranges of microscopic disorder, we show that the properties of the stress correlations at large lengthscales are surprisingly universal across all situations, independent of structural correlations, or the correlations in orientational order. In the near-crystalline limit, we present exact results for the stress correlations for both models, which work surprisingly well at large lengthscales, even in the amorphous phase. Finally, we study the differences in stress fluctuations across the amorphization transition, where stress correlations reveal the loss of periodicity in the structure at short lengthscales with increasing disorder.