Jamming in a bubble raft: order, disorder and glassy behavior

Soap bubbles floating at an air-liquid interface form stable aggregates resulting from capillary attraction between bubbles. Under external forcing the aggregates unjam and experience plastic events. By using bubble shape deformations as a proxy for the stress, we correlate bubble rearrangements with the stress field as the raft is subject to uniaxial oscillatory compression between parallel plates. We find that most rearrangement events occur immediately after a turning point in the cycle when the stress field changes direction and is most heterogeneous. We also compute metrics from tessellations of polygonal regions set by idealized contact points as well as particle bond orientations and analyze their statistics at different stages of the cycle.