English

Equilibrium sampling of hard spheres up to the jamming density and beyond

Statistical Mechanics 2016-06-14 v2 Soft Condensed Matter

Abstract

We implement and optimize a particle-swap Monte-Carlo algorithm that allows us to thermalize a polydisperse system of hard spheres up to unprecedentedly-large volume fractions, where \revise{previous} algorithms and experiments fail to equilibrate. We show that no glass singularity intervenes before the jamming density, which we independently determine through two distinct non-equilibrium protocols. We demonstrate that equilibrium fluid and non-equilibrium jammed states can have the same density, showing that the jamming transition cannot be the end-point of the fluid branch.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1511.06182,
  title  = {Equilibrium sampling of hard spheres up to the jamming density and beyond},
  author = {Ludovic Berthier and Daniele Coslovich and Andrea Ninarello and Misaki Ozawa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06182},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figs; To be published in Phys. Rev. Lett