Dense granular media as athermal glasses

Abstract

I briefly describe how mean-field glass models can be extended to the case in which the bath and friction are non-thermal, thus promoting them to granular matter mean-field caricatures. Solving their dynamics one discovers a temperature with a thermodynamic meaning associated with the slow rearrangements, even though there is no thermodynamic temperature at level of fast dynamics. This temperature can be shown to match the one defined on the basis of a flat measure over blocked (jammed) configurations. Numerical checks on realistic systems suggest that these features may be valid in general.