Rearrangements in cyclically sheared small jammed packings

Jammed systems which are cyclically sheared will often find periodic orbits after just a few cycles, thus encoding a memory of their drive amplitude. Aspects of these periodic orbits can be captured by models of interacting hysteretic regions ("hysterons") that represent particle rearrangements in the jammed packings. However, there remains a gap between hysterons as a model and the rearrangements they aim to describe. Here, we study small jammed systems — on the order of 10 particles — to probe the nature of rearrangements. We find that a substantial fraction of such packings include avalanches, a hallmark of interactions between rearrangements, in their periodic orbits. By examining the rearrangements in detail, we can begin to paint a more robust picture of the extent to which they behave like model hysterons.