The theory of mechanical response and stress transmission in disordered, jammed solids poses several open questions of how nonperiodic networks—apparently indistinguishable from a snapshot of a fluid—sustain shear. We present a stress-only theory of emergent elasticity for a nonthermal amorphous assembly of grains in a jammed solid, where each grain is subjected to mechanical constraints of force and torque balance. These grain-level constraints lead to the Gauss's law of an emergent $U\left(1\right)$ tensor electromagnetism, which then accounts for the mechanical response of such solids. This formulation of amorphous elasticity has several immediate consequences. The mechanical response maps exactly to the static, dielectric response of this tensorial electromagnetism with the polarizability of the medium mapping to emergent elastic moduli. External forces act as vector electric charges, whereas the tensorial magnetic fields are sourced by momentum density. The dynamics in the electric and magnetic sectors naturally translate into the dynamics of the rigid jammed network and ballistic particle motion, respectively. The theoretical predictions for both stress-stress correlations and responses are borne out by the results of numerical simulations of frictionless granular packings in the static limit of the theory in both 2D and 3D.

• Received 29 April 2022
• Accepted 22 September 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.106.065004