Can the jamming transition be described using equilibrium statistical mechanics?

When materials such as foams or emulsions are compressed, they display solid behaviour above the so-called ‘jamming’ transition. Because compression is done out of equilibrium in the absence of thermal fluctuations, jamming appears as a new kind of a nonequilibrium phase transition. In this proceedings paper, we suggest that tools from equilibrium statistical mechanics can in fact be used to describe many specific features of the jamming transition. Our strategy is to introduce thermal fluctuations and use statistical mechanics to describe the complex phase behaviour of systems of soft repulsive particles, before sending the temperature to zero at the end of the calculation. We show that currently available implementations of standard tools such as integral equations, mode-coupling theory, or replica calculations all break down at low temperature and large density, but we suggest that new analytical schemes can be developed to provide a fully microscopic, quantitative description of the jamming transition.