Related papers: Screw symmetry in columnar crystals
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…
We investigate the ordering properties of vertically-vibrated monolayers of granular cylinders in a circular container at high packing fraction. In line with previous works by other groups, we identify liquid-crystalline ordering behaviour…
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…
A crystal lattice, when confined to the surface of a cylinder, must have a periodic structure that is commensurate with the cylinder circumference. This constraint can frustrate the system, leading to oblique crystal lattices or to…
We study, via the replica method of disordered systems, the packing problem of hard-spheres with a square-well attractive potential when the space dimensionality, d, becomes infinitely large. The phase diagram of the system exhibits…
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…
Packing spheres efficiently in large dimension $d$ is a particularly difficult optimization problem. In this paper we add an isotropic interaction potential to the pure hard-core repulsion, and show that one can tune it in order to maximize…
A \emph{cylinder packing} is a family of congruent infinite circular cylinders with mutually disjoint interiors in $3$-dimensional Euclidean space. The \emph{local density} of a cylinder packing is the ratio between the volume occupied by…
We analyze the geometric structure and mechanical stability of a complete set of isostatic and hyperstatic sphere packings obtained via exact enumeration. The number of nonisomorphic isostatic packings grows exponentially with the number of…
Spherical particles confined to a sphere surface cannot pack densely into a hexagonal lattice without defects. In this study, we use hard particle Monte Carlo simulations to determine the effects of continuously deformable shape anisotropy…
Previously we reported on the stable (i.e. minimal enthalpy) structures of soft monodisperse spheres in a long cylindrical channel. Here, we present further simulations, which significantly extend the original phase diagram up to D/d =…
The inherent structure landscape for a system of hard spheres confined to a hard cylindrical channel, such that spheres can only contact their first and second neighbours, is studied using an analytical model that extends previous results…
The formation of quasi-spherical cages from protein building blocks is a remarkable self-assembly process in many natural systems, where a small number of elementary building blocks are assembled to build a highly symmetric icosahedral…
We use a hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm to simulate the shaking of spheres at different vibrational amplitudes, and find that spontaneous crystallisation occurs in specific dynamical regimes. Several crystallising transitions are typically…
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…
We study the octahedral configurations $O_6$ of six equal cylinders touching the unit sphere. We show that the configuration $O_6$ is a local sharp maximum of the distance function. Thus it is not unlockable and, moreover, rigid.
Thin elastic sheets bend easily, leading to mechanical instabilities such as wrinkling. Here, we investigate wrinkles at edges of bi-strips, which consist of two thin sheets, one that swells and one that does not, joined side-by-side. It is…
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…
It is commonly believed that the most efficient way to pack a finite number of equal-sized spheres is by arranging them tightly in a cluster. However, mathematicians have conjectured that a linear arrangement may actually result in the…
We use numerical simulation to investigate and analyze the way that rigid disks and spheres arrange themselves when compressed next to incommensurate substrates. For disks, a movable set is pressed into a jammed state against an ordered…