Related papers: Close packing of rods on spherical surfaces
Liquid crystals can self-organize into a layered smectic phase. While the smectic layers are typically straight forming a lamellar pattern in bulk, external confinement may drastically distort the layers due to the boundary conditions…
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…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…
Assemblies of purely repulsive and frictionless particles, such as emulsions or hard spheres, display very curious properties near their jamming transition, which occurs at the random close packing for mono-disperse spheres. Although such…
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.…
We report on a comprehensive computer simulation study of the liquid-crystal phase behaviour of purely repulsive, semi-flexible rod-like particles. For the four aspect ratios we consider, the particles form five distinct phases depending on…
We present a multi-scale model to study the attachment of spherical particles with a rigid core, coated with binding ligands and in equilibrium with the surrounding, quiescent fluid medium. This class of fluid-immersed adhesion is…
Connecting the collective behavior of disordered systems with local structure on the particle scale is an important challenge, for example in granular and glassy systems. Compounding complexity, in many scientific and industrial…
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 suggest a geometrical mechanism for the ordering of slender filaments inside non-isotropic containers, using cortical microtubules in plant cells and packing of viral genetic material inside capsids as concrete examples. We show…
The effects of particle roughness and short-ranged non-central forces on colloidal gels are studied using computer simulations in which particles experience a sinusoidal variation in energy as they rotate. The number of minima $n$ and…
An ellipsoid, the simplest non-spherical shape, has been extensively used as models for elongated building blocks for a wide spectrum of molecular, colloidal and granular systems. Yet the densest packing of congruent hard ellipsoids, which…
We perform numerical simulations of purely repulsive soft colloidal particles interacting via a generalized elastic potential and constrained to a two-dimensional plane and to the surface of a spherical shell. For the planar case, we…
Three-dimensional discrete numerical simulation is used to investigate the properties of close-packed frictionless granular assemblies as a function of particle polydispersity and shape. Unlike some experimental results, simulations show…
Confinement can have a considerable effect on the behavior of particle systems, and is therefore an effective way to discover new phenomena. A notable example is a system of identical bosons at low temperature under an external field…
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…
Confocal microscopy in combination with real-space particle tracking has proven to be a powerful tool in scientific fields such as soft matter physics, materials science and cell biology. However, 3D tracking of anisotropic particles in…
We use computational experiments to find the rectangles of minimum area into which a given number n of non-overlapping congruent circles can be packed. No assumption is made on the shape of the rectangles. Most of the packings found have…
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…
In the classic circle packing problem, one asks whether a given set of circles can be packed into a given container. Packing problems like this have been shown to be $\mathsf{NP}$-hard. In this paper, we present new sufficient conditions…