Sticky Matters: Jamming and Rigid Cluster Statistics with Attractive Particle Interactions

While the large majority of theoretical and numerical studies of the jamming transition consider athermal

packings of purely repulsive spheres, real complex fluids and soft solids generically display attraction

between particles. By studying the statistics of rigid clusters in simulations of soft particles with an

attractive shell, we present evidence for two distinct jamming scenarios. Strongly attractive systems

undergo a continuous transition in which rigid clusters grow and ultimately diverge in size at a critical

packing fraction. Purely repulsive and weakly attractive systems jam via a first-order transition, with no

growing cluster size. We further show that the weakly attractive scenario is a finite size effect, so that for

any nonzero attraction strength, a sufficiently large system will fall in the strongly attractive universality

class. We therefore expect attractive jamming to be generic in the laboratory and in nature.

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