Investigating the Nature of Discontinuous Shear Thickening: Beyond a Mean-Field Description
Abstract
Dense suspensions can undergo a dramatic increase in viscosity at a critical value of the shear stress. This phenomenon, termed discontinuous shear thickening (DST), has been attributed to an increase in the fraction of particle interactions becoming frictional with increasing shear stress, and a successful mean-field theory has been developed to explain various accompanying rheological properties. On a microscopic scale, however, conventional structural analysis measures such as the grain-position pair correlation function show no significant changes with the onset of DST, though recent work has shown that similar analysis in the dual space of contact forces does lead to marked changes at this transition. Furthermore, experimental results have suggested the existence of higher-order microscopic correlations and the importance of incorporating fluctuations away from a mean-field description. To this end, we use a higher-order cluster analysis tool to study the force networks obtained from simulations of dense suspensions to construct an effective interaction potential in force space. We show that there are significant changes occurring in this potential as a function of density and stress close to DST. We discuss the implications of these observations on an emergent field theory of the DST transition.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{thomas2026investigating,
title = {{Investigating the Nature of Discontinuous Shear Thickening: Beyond a Mean-Field Description}},
author = {Jetin E. Thomas and Abhay Goyal and Deshpreet Singh Bedi and Abhinendra Singh and Emanuela Del Gado and Bulbul Chakraborty},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.15288},
eprint = {2609.15288},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15288},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Investigating the Nature of Discontinuous Shear Thickening: Beyond a Mean-Field Description
AU - Jetin E. Thomas
AU - Abhay Goyal
AU - Deshpreet Singh Bedi
AU - Abhinendra Singh
AU - Emanuela Del Gado
AU - Bulbul Chakraborty
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.15288
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.15288
AB - Dense suspensions can undergo a dramatic increase in viscosity at a critical value of the shear stress. This phenomenon, termed discontinuous shear thickening (DST), has been attributed to an increase in the fraction of particle interactions becoming frictional with increasing shear stress, and a successful mean-field theory has been developed to explain various accompanying rheological properties. On a microscopic scale, however, conventional structural analysis measures such as the grain-position pair correlation function show no significant changes with the onset of DST, though recent work has shown that similar analysis in the dual space of contact forces does lead to marked changes at this transition. Furthermore, experimental results have suggested the existence of higher-order microscopic correlations and the importance of incorporating fluctuations away from a mean-field description. To this end, we use a higher-order cluster analysis tool to study the force networks obtained from simulations of dense suspensions to construct an effective interaction potential in force space. We show that there are significant changes occurring in this potential as a function of density and stress close to DST. We discuss the implications of these observations on an emergent field theory of the DST transition.
ER -