Related papers: Symmetry, shape, and order
Packing problems have been a source of fascination for millenia and their study has produced a rich literature that spans numerous disciplines. Investigations of hard-particle packing models have provided basic insights into the structure…
Dense polyhedron packings are useful models of a variety of condensed matter and biological systems and have intrigued scientists mathematicians for centuries. Recently, organizing principles for the types of structures associated with the…
Particle packing problems have fascinated people since the dawn of civilization, and continue to intrigue mathematicians and scientists. Resurgent interest has been spurred by the recent proof of Kepler's conjecture: the face-centered cubic…
Bead packs of up to 150,000 mono-sized spheres with packing densities ranging from 0.58 to 0.64 have been studied by means of X-ray Computed Tomography. These studies represent the largest and the most accurate description of the structure…
Optimal geometrical arrangements, such as the stacking of atoms, are of relevance in diverse disciplines. A classic problem is the determination of the optimal arrangement of spheres in three dimensions in order to achieve the highest…
Molecular simulations of the self-assembly of cone-shaped particles with specific, attractive interactions are performed. Upon cooling from random initial conditions, we find that the cones self assemble into clusters and that clusters…
Symbolic and graphical tools, such as Mathematica, enable precise visualization and analysis of void spaces in sphere packings. In the cubic close packing (CCP, or face-centred cubic packing; FCC) arrangement these voids can be partitioned…
Dense packings have served as useful models of the structure of liquid, glassy and crystal states of matter, granular media, heterogeneous materials, and biological systems. Probing the symmetries and other mathematical properties of the…
Packings of hard polyhedra have been studied for centuries due to their mathematical aesthetic and more recently for their applications in fields such as nanoscience, granular and colloidal matter, and biology. In all these fields, particle…
This is the fifth in a series of papers giving a proof of the Kepler conjecture, which asserts that the density of a packing of congruent spheres in three dimensions is never greater than $\pi/\sqrt{18}\approx 0.74048...$. This is the…
One of the basic problems in discrete geometry is to determine the most efficient packing of congruent replicas of a given convex set $K$ in the plane or in space. The most commonly used measure of efficiency is density. Several types of…
We analyze the general problem of determining optimally dense packings, in a Euclidean or hyperbolic space, of congruent copies of some fixed finite set of bodies. We are strongly guided by examples of aperiodic tilings in Euclidean space…
This is the sixth in a series of papers giving a proof of the Kepler conjecture, which asserts that the density of a packing of congruent spheres in three dimensions is never greater than $\pi/\sqrt{18}\approx 0.74048...$. This is the…
We present a method for discovering dense packings of general convex hard particles and apply it to study the dense packing behavior of a one-parameter family of particles with tetrahedral symmetry representing a deformation of the ideal…
A disordered solid, such as an athermal jammed packing of soft spheres, exists in a rugged potential-energy landscape in which there are a myriad of stable configurations that defy easy enumeration and characterization. Nevertheless, in…
We examine packing of $n$ congruent spheres in a cube when $n$ is close but less than the number of spheres in a regular cubic close-packed (ccp) arrangement of $\lceil p^{3}/2\rceil$ spheres. For this family of packings, the previous…
The three dimensional structure of large packings of monosized spheres with volume fractions ranging between 0.58 and 0.64 has been studied with X-ray Computed Tomography. We search for signatures of organization, we classify local…
Studies of random close packing of spheres have advanced our knowledge about the structure of systems such as liquids, glasses, emulsions, granular media, and amorphous solids. When these systems are confined their structural properties…
We study dense packings of a large number of congruent non-overlapping circles inside a square by looking for configurations which maximize the packing density, defined as the ratio between the area occupied by the disks and the area of the…
We investigate ordering properties of two-dimensional granular materials using several shapes created by welding ball bearings together. Ordered domains form much more easily in two than in three dimensions, even when configurations lack…