Three-dimensional jamming and flows of soft glassy materials

Various disordered dense systems, such as foams, gels, emulsions and colloidal suspensions, undergo a jamming transition from a liquid state (they flow) to a solid state below a yield stress(1). Their structure, which has been thoroughly studied with powerful means of three-dimensional characterization(2-6), shows some analogy with that of glasses(1,7,8), which led to them being named soft glassy materials(9). However, despite its importance for geophysical and industrial applications(10,11), their rheological behaviour(10,12), and its microscopic origin(1,13), is still poorly known, in particular because of its nonlinear nature. Here we show from two original experiments that a simple three-dimensional continuum description of the behaviour of soft glassy materials can be built. We first show that when a flow is imposed in some direction there is no yield resistance to a secondary flow: these systems are always unjammed simultaneously in all directions of space. The three-dimensional jamming criterion seems to be the plasticity criterion encountered in most solids(14). We also find that they behave as simple liquids in the direction orthogonal to that of the main flow; their viscosity is inversely proportional to the main flow shear rate, as a signature of shear-induced structural relaxation, in close similarity to the structural relaxations driven by temperature and density in other glassy systems.