Jammed packings behave similarly under random force and shear

Mean-field calculations suggest that in infinite dimensions, the response of a system to global shear and random forces may be equivalent. Whether or not this is true in 2d or 3d systems remains an open question. To address this, we develop a method for driving 2d jammed packings of disks by quasti-static persistent random forces and demonstrate that the response is similar to what is observed in athermal quasi-static shear simulations. We also investigate the gap and small force statistics in these randomly forced packings as well as the spatial organization of vibrational modes and particle rearrangements in order to compare to similar observations under shear. We expect that the results of this work may have interesting applications in understanding emergent behavior in active matter systems.