Related papers: Three simple scenarios for high-dimensional sphere…

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 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…

All hard, convex shapes are conjectured by Ulam to pack more densely than spheres, which have a maximum packing fraction of {\phi} = {\pi}/\sqrt18 ~ 0.7405. For many shapes, simple lattice packings easily surpass this packing fraction. For…

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 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…

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 =…

We derive a microscopic criterion for the stability of hard sphere configurations, and we show empirically that this criterion is marginally satisfied in the glass. This observation supports a geometric interpretation for the initial rapid…

We consider the nature of the fluid-solid phase transition in a polydisperse mixture of hard spheres. For a sufficiently polydisperse mixture crystallisation occurs with simultaneous fractionation. At the fluid-solid boundary, a broad fluid…

The ideal glass, a disordered system of particles with zero configurational entropy, cannot be realized through thermal processes. Nevertheless, we present a method for constructing ideal jammed packings of soft spheres, and thus the zero…

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 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…

We present a computer simulation study on crystal nucleation and growth in supersaturated suspensions of mono-disperse hard spheres induced by a triangular lattice substrate. The main result is that compressed substrates are wet by the…

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…

Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…

We consider homogeneous crystallisation rates in confocal microscopy experiments on colloidal nearly hard spheres at the single particle level. These we compare with Brownian dynamics simuations by carefully modelling the softness in the…

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 have discovered a new family of three-dimensional crystal sphere packings that are strictly jammed (i.e., mechanically stable) and yet possess an anomalously low density. This family constitutes an uncountably infinite number of crystal…

We reconsider model II of [J. Chem. Phys. 1968, 49, 1778--1783], a two-dimensional lattice-gas system featuring a crystalline phase and two distinct fluid phases (liquid and vapor). In this system, a particle prevents other particles from…

We investigate the response of a system of hard spheres to two classes of perturbations over a range of densities spanning the fluid, crystalline, and glassy regimes within a molecular dynamics framework. Firstly, we consider the relaxation…

An earlier paper describes a program to prove the Kepler conjecture on sphere packings. This paper carries out the second step of that program. A sphere packing leads to a decomposition of $R^3$ into polyhedra. The polyhedra are divided…