Related papers: The Ideal Glass and the Ideal Disk Packing in Two …
Rapid cooling of liquids below a certain temperature range can result in a transition to glassy states. The traditional understanding of glasses includes their thermodynamic metastability with respect to crystals. However, here we present…
We demonstrate that there is no ideal glass transition in a binary hard-disk mixture by explicitly constructing an exponential number of jammed packings with densities spanning the spectrum from the accepted ``amorphous'' glassy state to…
Recently extended precise numerical methods and droplet scaling arguments allow for a coherent picture of the glassy states of two-dimensional Ising spin glasses to be assembled. The length scale at which entropy becomes important and…
Self-assembly of granular particles is of great interest in both applied and basic research. It is commonly observed that when randomly packed into a container, granular particles form disordered structures like glass. As the particles are…
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 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 use computer simulations to probe the thermodynamic and dynamic properties of a glass-former that undergoes an ideal glass-transition because of the presence of randomly pinned particles. We find that even deep in the equilibrium glass…
When are athermal soft sphere packings jammed ? Any experimentally relevant definition must at the very least require a jammed packing to resist shear. We demonstrate that widely used (numerical) protocols in which particles are compressed…
In a laboratory, a two-dimensional complex (dusty) plasma consists of a low-density ionized gas containing a confined suspension of Yukawa-coupled plastic microspheres. For an initial crystal-like form, we report ideal gas behavior in this…
Soft matter systems are common in nature and make up nearly all the essential components necessary for life, from cells to the organelles within those cells. The ability of these soft materials to deform is crucial for the proper…
Order and disorder constitute two fundamental and opposite themes in condensed matter physics and materials science. Crystals are considered the epitome of order, characterised by long-range translational order. The discovery of…
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…
Formulating a statistical mechanics for granular matter remains a significant challenge, in part, due to the difficulty associated with a complete characterization of the systems under study. We present a fully characterized model of a…
In order to understand the long-standing problem of the nature of glass states, we performed intensive simulations on the thermodynamic properties and potential energy surface of an ideal glass. We found that the atoms of an ideal glass…
Glass materials, as quintessential non-equilibrium systems, exhibit properties such as energy dissipation that are highly sensitive to their preparation histories. A key challenge has been identifying a unified order parameter to…
The fact that a disordered material is not constrained in its properties in the same way as a crystal presents significant and yet largely untapped potential for novel material design. However, unlike their crystalline counterparts,…
A densely packed granular system is an example of an out-of-equilibrium system in the jammed state. It has been a longstanding problem to determine whether this class of systems can be described by concepts arising from equilibrium…
Disordered hyperuniform packings are unusual amorphous states of two-phase materials that are endowed with exotic physical properties. Such hyperuniform systems are characterized by an anomalous suppression of volume-fraction fluctuations…
Using the most recent numerical data by Bolton-Lum \emph{et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 058201 (2026)], we demonstrate that ideal ultrastable glasses in the athermal limit (or ultrastable ideal 2D disk packings) possess a remarkably high…
Amorphous materials as diverse as foams, emulsions, colloidal suspensions and granular media can jam into a rigid, disordered state where they withstand finite shear stresses before yielding. Here we review the current understanding of the…