Related papers: Three simple scenarios for high-dimensional sphere…
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…
Hard spheres are ubiquitous in condensed matter: they have been used as models for liquids, crystals, colloidal systems, granular systems, and powders. Packings of hard spheres are of even wider interest, as they are related to important…
In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…
Although the concept of random close packing with an almost universal packing fraction of ~ 0.64 for hard spheres was introduced more than half a century ago, there are still ongoing debates. The main difficulty in searching the densest…
We study by molecular dynamics the interplay between arrest and crystallization in hard spheres. For state points in the plane of volume fraction ($0.54 \leq phi \leq 0.63$) and polydispersity ($0 \leq s \leq 0.085$), we delineate states…
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…
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…
We recently found that crystallization of monodisperse hard spheres from the bulk fluid faces a much higher free energy barrier in four than in three dimensions at equivalent supersaturation, due to the increased geometrical frustration…
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…
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…
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…
We consider the crystallization problem for a finite one-dimensional collection of identical hard spheres in a periodic energy landscape. This issue arises in connection with the investigation of crystalline states of ionic dimers, as well…
We study numerically the crystallization of a hard-sphere mixture with 8\% polydispersity. Although often used as a model glass former, for small system sizes we observe crystallization in molecular dynamics simulations. This opens the…
Particle size polydispersity can help to inhibit crystallization of the hard-sphere fluid into close-packed structures at high packing fractions and thus is often employed to create model glass-forming systems. Nonetheless, it is known that…
We obtain analytic expressions for the time correlation functions of a liquid of spherical particles, exact in the limit of high dimensions $d$. The derivation is long but straightforward: a dynamic virial expansion for which only the first…
There exists a variety of theories of the glass transition and many more numerical models. But because the models need built-in complexity to prevent crystallization, comparisons with theory can be difficult. We study the dynamics of a…
Hard spheres with a polydispersity above approximately 8% are shown to crystallise into two phase-separated solid phases. A polydispersity above 8% is too large to be tolerated by a single solid phase but phase separation produces two…
The aim of this paper is to review and discuss qualitatively some results on the properties of amorphous packings of hard spheres that were recently obtained by means of the replica method. The theory gives predictions for the equation of…
We have carried out computer simulations of overcompressed suspensions of hard monodisperse ellipsoids and observed their crystallization dynamics. The system was compressed very rapidly in order to reach the regime of slow, glass-like…
We present an efficient Monte Carlo method for the lattice sphere packing problem in d dimensions. We use this method to numerically discover de novo the densest lattice sphere packing in dimensions 9 through 20. Our method goes beyond…