title: Jamming threshold of dry fine powders.
abstract: We report a novel experimental study on the jamming transition of dry fine powders with controlled attractive energy and particle size. Like in attractive colloids dry fine particles experience diffusion-limited clustering in the fluidlike regime. At the jamming threshold fractal clusters crowd in a metastable state at volume fractions depending on attractive energy and close to the volume fraction of hard nonattractive spheres at jamming. Near the phase transition the stress-(volume fraction) relationship can be fitted to a critical-like functional form for a small range of applied stresses sigma approximately (phi-phi(J))(beta) as measured on foams, emulsions, and colloidal systems and predicted by numerical simulations on hard spheres.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Electronica y Electromagnetismo, Universidad de Sevilla, Avenida Reina Mercedes s/n, 41012 Seville, Spain.
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Valverde
authors.forename: M A S
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Quintanilla
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Castellanos