Related papers: Pushing the glass transition towards random close …

We use computer simulations to study the glass transition of dense fluids made of polydisperse, repulsive spheres. For hard particles, we vary the volume fraction, phi, and use compressible particles to explore finite temperatures, T>0. In…

Motivated by a recently identified severe discrepancy between a static and a dynamic theory of glasses, we numerically investigate the behavior of dense hard spheres in spatial dimensions 3 to 12. Our results are consistent with the static…

A fresh approach to the data from experiments with hard sphere colloids yields seminal insights into the glass transition. The precise determination of the fraction of particles caged by their neighbours is unprecedented and provides…

The most efficient way to pack equally sized spheres isotropically in 3D is known as the random close packed state, which provides a starting point for many approximations in physics and engineering. However, the particle size distribution…

We propose a connection between self-similar, focusing dynamics in nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) and macroscopic dynamic features of the glass transition. In particular, we explore the divergence of the appropriate…

We study jammed configurations of hard spheres as a function of compression speed using an event-driven molecular dynamics algorithm. We find that during the compression, the pressure follows closely the metastable liquid branch until the…

Glass transition and random packing in the hard sphere system have attracted great attention due to the important role of the system in the investigation of diverse real systems including liquids, colloidal dispersions, supercooled liquids,…

We use molecular dynamics to investigate the glass transition occurring at large volume fraction, phi, and low temperature, T, in assemblies of soft repulsive particles. We find that equilibrium dynamics in the (phi, T) plane obey a form of…

The equation of state of a hard sphere fluid at high density should exhibit a simple pole at the random close packing limit. Here we show that trying to obtain a compact semi-empirical equation of state simultaneously compatible with that…

Glass transition is accompanied by a rapid growth of the structural relaxation time and a concomitant decrease of configurational entropy. It remains unclear whether the transition has a thermodynamic origin, and whether the dynamic arrest…

We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…

Motivated by old experiments on colloidal suspensions, we report molecular dynamics simulations of assemblies of hard spheres, addressing crystallization and glass formation. The simulations cover wide ranges of polydispersity s (standard…

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…

Based on results from the physics and mathematics literature which suggest a series of clearly defined conjectures, we formulate three simple scenarios for the fate of hard sphere crystallization in high dimension: (A) crystallization is…

In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…

Randomly packing spheres of equal size into a container consistently results in a static configuration with a density of ~64%. The ubiquity of random close packing (RCP) rather than the optimal crystalline array at 74% begs the question of…

We use the replica method to study the ideal glass transition of a liquid of identical Hard Spheres. We obtain estimates of the configurational entropy in the liquid phase, of the Kauzmann packing fraction, in the range 0.58--0.62, and of…

Crystallization and vitrification are two different routes to form a solid. Normally these two processes suppress each other, with the glass transition preventing crystallization at high density (or low temperature). This is even true for…

The reformulation of the mode-coupling theory (MCT) of the liquid-glass transition which incorporates the element of metastability is applied to the hard-sphere system. It is shown that the glass transition in this system is not a sharp one…

We address the crystallization of monodisperse hard spheres in terms of the properties of finite- size crystalline clusters. By means of large scale event-driven Molecular Dynamics simulations, we study systems at different packing…