Universal Relaxation Dynamics of Sphere Packings below Jamming

We show that non-Brownian suspensions of repulsive spheres below jamming display a slow relaxational dynamics with a characteristic timescale that diverges at jamming. This slow timescale is fully encoded in the structure of the unjammed packing and can be readily measured via the vibrational density of states. We show that the corresponding dynamic critical exponent is the same for randomly generated and sheared packings. Our results show that a wide variety of physical situations, from suspension rheology to algorithmic studies of the jamming transition are controlled by a unique diverging timescale, with a universal critical exponent.