Shear Jamming occurs for frictional granular materials with packing fractions in φS <φ<φJ, below the lowest isotropically jammed frictionless state at φJ. This phenomenon occurs when the material is subject to shear strain, γ, starting from a force-free state. Shear jammed states have anisotropic networks of particles carrying strong forces, e.g. force chains. We identify a new paradigm to understand how such states/networks arise in response to volume-preserving shear strain. We argue that key small scale geometric structures enable this process. We identify these structures, trimers and branches, in physical experiments consisting of two dimensional frictional discs, and verify their role in shear jamming. Trimers are triplets of grains where two outer grains contact a center grain. Branches occur where three or more quasi-linear force chain segments intersect. Certain trimers respond to shear by compressing and by bending; the latter is a nonlinear process that can push particles in the dilation direction faster than the affine dilation. Trimer bending and branches both contribute to increasing the average contact number per particle, Z, above the isostatic value, Ziso > 3 needed for jamming 2D frictional grains, and thus provide micro-mechanisms for shear jamming. |