Gardner transition coincides with the emergence of jamming scalings in hard spheres and disks

Abstract

The Gardner transition in structural glasses is characterized by full-replica symmetry breaking of the free-energy landscape and the onset of anomalous aging dynamics due to marginal stability. Here we show that this transition also has a structural signature in finite-dimensional glasses consisting of hard spheres and disks. By analyzing the distribution of inter-particle gaps in the simulated static configurations at different pressures, we find that the Gardner transition coincides with the emergence of two well-known jamming scalings in the gap distribution, which enables the extraction of a structural order parameter. The jamming scalings reflect a compressible effective force network formed by contact and quasi-contact gaps, while non-contact gaps that do not participate in the effective force network are incompressible. Our results suggest that the Gardner transition in hard-particle glasses is a precursor of the jamming transition. The proposed structural signature and order parameter provide a convenient approach to detecting the Gardner transition in future granular experiments.