Fundamental challenges in packing problems: from spherical to non-spherical particles

Despite its long history, there are many fundamental issues concerning random packings of spheres that remain elusive, including a precise definition of random close packing (RCP). We argue that the current picture of RCP cannot be made mathematically precise and support this conclusion via a molecular dynamics study of hard spheres using the Lubachevsky-Stillinger compression algorithm. We suggest that this impasse can be broken by introducing the new concept of a maximally ...

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. By leveraging existing understanding of the random packing of spherical particles, we estimate the random packing density for all sufficiently spherical shapes. Our method uses the ensemble of random packing configurations of spheres as a ...

Unraveling the complexities of random packing in three dimensions has long puzzled physicists. While both experiments and simulations consistently show a maximum density of 64 percent for tightly packed random spheres, we still lack an unambiguous and universally accepted definition of random packing. This paper introduces an innovative standpoint, depicting random packing as spheres closest to a quenched Poisson field of random points. We furnish an efficacious algorithm to ...

The concept of jamming has attracted great research interest due to its broad relevance in soft matter such as liquids, glasses, colloids, foams, and granular materials, and its deep connection to the sphere packing problem and optimization problems. Here we show that the domain of amorphous jammed states of frictionless spheres can be significantly extended, from the well-known jamming-point at a fixed density, to a jamming-plane that spans the density and shear strain axes....

Continuing on recent computational and experimental work on jammed packings of hard ellipsoids [Donev et al., Science, vol. 303, 990-993] we consider jamming in packings of smooth strictly convex nonspherical hard particles. We explain why the isocounting conjecture, which states that for large disordered jammed packings the average contact number per particle is twice the number of degrees of freedom per particle (\bar{Z}=2d_{f}), does not apply to nonspherical particles. We...

We investigate the distribution of the volume and coordination number associated to each particle in a jammed packing of monodisperse hard sphere using the mesoscopic ensemble developed in Nature 453, 606 (2008). Theory predicts an exponential distribution of the orientational volumes for random close packings and random loose packings. A comparison with computer generated packings reveals deviations from the theoretical prediction in the volume distribution, which can be bet...

In this thesis I present most of the results obtained during my PhD, where I worked on different subjects regarding jamming in systems of frictionless spheres. In particular, I focused on microscopic properties of jammed packings, such as the distribution of contact forces and interparticle gaps, as well as the single particle dynamics that occur near the jamming point. Several of these results have already been presented in Refs. [1,2], but here I include a more detailed ana...

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 together, can and do produce packings which are unstable to shear - and that the probability of generating such packings reaches one near jamming. We introduce a new protocol that, by allowing the system to explore different box shapes as i...

Finding the optimal random packing of non-spherical particles is an open problem with great significance in a broad range of scientific and engineering fields. So far, this search has been performed only empirically on a case-by-case basis, in particular, for shapes like dimers, spherocylinders and ellipsoids of revolution. Here, we present a mean-field formalism to estimate the packing density of axisymmetric non-spherical particles. We derive an analytic continuation from t...

In the late 1980s, Sam Edwards proposed a possible statistical-mechanical framework to describe the properties of disordered granular materials. A key assumption underlying the theory was that all jammed packings are equally likely. In the intervening years it has never been possible to test this bold hypothesis directly. Here we present simulations that provide direct evidence that at the unjamming point, all packings of soft repulsive particles are equally likely, even thou...