Friday, 08 September, 2006
Floppy Modes and Nonaffine Deformations in Random Fiber Networks
Claus Heussinger and Erwin Frey -
Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 105501 (2006)
We study the elasticity of random fiber networks. Starting from a microscopic picture of the nonaffine deformation fields, we calculate the macroscopic elastic moduli both in a scaling theory and a self-consistent effective medium theory. By relating nonaffinity to the low-energy excitations of the network ("floppy modes"), we achieve a detailed characterization of the nonaffine deformations present in fibrous networks.Our results are confirmed by stochastic simulations.