English

Ultrastable 2D glasses and packings explained by local centrosymmetry

Soft Condensed Matter 2026-02-09 v3 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks Materials Science Statistical Mechanics Computational Physics

Abstract

Using the most recent numerical data by Bolton-Lum \emph{et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 058201 (2026)], we demonstrate that ideal ultrastable glasses in the athermal limit (or ultrastable ideal 2D disk packings) possess a remarkably high degree of local centrosymmetry. In particular, we find that the inversion-symmetry order parameter for local force transmission introduced in Milkus and Zaccone, [Phys. Rev. 93, 094204 (2016)], is as high as FIS=0.84522F_{IS}= 0.84522, to be compared with FIS=1F_{IS}=1 for perfect centrosymmetric crystals free of defects, and with FIS0.30.5F_{IS} \sim 0.3-0.5 for standard random packings. This observation provides a clear, natural explanation for the ultra-high shear modulus of ideal packings and ideal glasses, because the high centrosymmetry prevents non-affine relaxations which decrease the shear modulus. The same mechanism explains the absence of boson peak-like soft vibrational modes. These results also confirm what was found previous work, i.e. that the bond-orientational order parameter is a very poor correlator for the vibrational and mechanical

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.03770,
  title  = {Ultrastable 2D glasses and packings explained by local centrosymmetry},
  author = {A. Zaccone},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.03770},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

A few typos fixed

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:34:41.687Z