Related papers: Densest columnar structures of hard spheres from s…
Packing problems, which ask how to arrange a collection of objects in space to meet certain criteria, are important in a great many physical and biological systems, where geometrical arrangements at small scales control behaviour at larger…
Packing problems have been of great interest in many diverse contexts for many centuries. The optimal packing of identical objects has been often invoked to understand the nature of low temperature phases of matter. In celebrated work,…
We revisit the densest binary sphere packings (DBSP) under the periodic boundary conditions and present an updated phase diagram, including newly found 12 putative densest structures over the $x - \alpha$ plane, where $x$ is the relative…
High strength-to-weight ratio materials can be constructed by either maximizing strength or minimizing weight. Tensegrity structures and aerogels take very different paths to achieving high strength-to-weight ratios but both rely on…
We present the first systematic algorithm to estimate the maximum packing density of spheres when the grain sizes are drawn from an arbitrary size distribution. With an Apollonian filling rule, we implement our technique for disks in 2d and…
We have previously explored cylindrical packings of disks and their relation to sphere packings. Here we extend the analytical treatment of disk packings, analysing the rules for phyllotactic indices of related structures and the variation…
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 line of hard spheres confined by a transverse harmonic potential, with hard walls at its ends, exhibits a variety of buckled structures as it is compressed longitudinally. Here we show that these may be conveniently observed in a rotating…
The discrepancy in nucleation rate densities between simulated and experimental hard spheres remains staggering and unexplained. Suggestively, more strongly sedimenting colloidal suspensions of hard spheres nucleate much faster than weakly…
The exploration of the densest sphere packings is a fundamental problem in mathematics and a wide variety of sciences including materials science. We present our exhaustive computational exploration of the densest ternary sphere packings…
We show that hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates pack denser with periodic adaptive prismatic structures which are composed of alternating prisms of spheres. The internal structure of the prisms adapts to the slit height…
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…
The phase behaviour and structural properties of a monolayer of hard particles is examined in such a confinement, where the adsorbed particles are constrained to the surface of a narrow hard cylindrical pore. The diameter of the pore is…
The structure of the densest crystal packings is determined for a variety of concave shapes in 2D constructed by the overlap of two or three disks. The maximum contact number per particle pair is defined and proposed as a useful means of…
Under special conditions bacteria excrete an attractant and aggregate. The high density regions initially collapse into cylindrical structures, which subsequently destabilize and break up into spherical aggregates. This paper presents a…
Inspired by recent developments in self-assembled chiral nanostructures, we have explored the possibility of using spherical particles packed in cylinders as building blocks for chiral photonic crystals. In particular, we focused on an…
Rigid particles pack into structures, such as sand dunes on the beach, whose overall stability is determined by the average number of contacts between particles. However, when packing spatially extended objects with flexible shapes,…
We study the optimal packing of short, hard spherocylinders confined to lie tangential to a spherical surface, using simulated annealing and molecular dynamics simulations. For clusters of up to twelve particles, we map out the changes in…
Nanoparticles with "sticky patches" have long been proposed as building blocks for the self-assembly of complex structures. The synthetic realizability of such patchy particles, however, greatly lags behind predictions of patterns they…
Obtaining general relations between macroscopic properties of random assemblies, such as density, and the microscopic properties of their constituent particles, such as shape, is a foundational challenge in the study of amorphous materials.…