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We study the optimal packing of hard spheres in an infinitely long cylinder, using simulated annealing, and compare our results with the analogous problem of packing disks on the unrolled surface of a cylinder. The densest structures are…
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…
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 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…
By using long-range interacting polygons, we experimentally probe the coupling between particle shape and long-range interaction. For two typical space-filling polygons, square and triangle, we find two types of coupling modes that…
The intricate interplay between colloidal particle shape and precisely engineered interaction potentials has paved the way for the discovery of unprecedented crystal structures in both two and three dimensions. Here, we make use of…
Complex crystal structures are composed of multiple local environments, and how this type of order emerges spontaneously during crystal growth has yet to be fully understood. We study crystal growth across various structures and along…
Patchy colloidal platelets with convex, non-spherical shapes have been realized with different materials at length scales ranging from nanometers to microns. While the assembly of these hard shapes tends to maximize edge-to-edge contacts,…
The Materials Project crystal structure database has been searched for materials possessing layered motifs in their crystal structures using a topology-scaling algorithm. The algorithm identifies and measures the sizes of bonded atomic…
If a collection of identical particles is poured into a container, different shapes will fill to different densities. But what is the shape that fills a container as close as possible to a pre-specified, desired density? We demonstrate a…
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…
We formulate the problem of generating dense packings of nonoverlapping, non-tiling polyhedra within an adaptive fundamental cell subject to periodic boundary conditions as an optimization problem, which we call the Adaptive Shrinking Cell…
Maximally random jammed (MRJ) particle packings can be viewed as prototypical glasses in that they are maximally disordered while simultaneously being mechanically rigid. The prediction of the MRJ packing density phi, among other packing…
The mechanical, optical, and chemical properties of a wide variety of soft materials are enabled and constrained by their bulk structure. How this structure emerges at small system sizes during self-assembly has been the subject of decades…
We calculate the configurational entropy of hard particles confined in a cavity using Monte Carlo integration. Multiple combinations of particle and cavity shapes are considered. For small numbers of particles $N$, we show that the entropy…
The topological structure resulting from the network of contacts between grains (\emph{contact network}) is studied for large samples of monosized spheres with densities (fraction of volume occupied by the spheres) ranging from 0.59 to…
The channel size distribution in hard sphere systems, based on the local neighbor correlation of four particle positions, is investigated for all volume fractions up to jamming. For each particle, all three particle combinations of…
We introduce a computational method to optimize target physical properties in the full configuration space regarding atomic composition, chemical stoichiometry, and crystal structure. The approach combines the universal potential of the…
Recent advances in classical density functional theory are combined with stochastic process theory and rare event techniques to formulate a theoretical description of nucleation, including crystallization, that can predict nonclassical…
It has recently been shown that identical, isotropic particles can form complex crystals and quasicrystals. In order to understand the relation between the particle interaction and the structure, which it stabilizes, the phase behavior of a…