Simulating Hard Rigid Bodies

Abstract

Several physical systems in condensed matter have been modeled approximating their constituent particles as hard objects. The hard spheres model has been indeed one of the cornerstones of the computational and theoretical description in condensed matter. The next level of description is to consider particles as rigid objects of generic shape, which would enrich the possible phenomenology enormously. This kind of modeling will prove to be interesting in all those situations in which steric effects play a relevant role. These include biology, soft matter, granular materials and molecular systems. With a view to developing a general recipe for event-driven Molecular Dynamics simulations of hard rigid bodies, two algorithms for calculating the distance between two convex hard rigid bodies and the contact time of two colliding hard rigid bodies solving a non-linear set of equations will be described. Building on these two methods, an event-driven molecular dynamics algorithm for simulating systems of convex hard rigid bodies will be developed and illustrated in details. In order to optimize the collision detection between very elongated hard rigid bodies, a novel nearest-neighbor list method based on an oriented bounding box will be introduced and fully explained. Efficiency and performance of the new algorithm proposed will be extensively tested for uniaxial hard ellipsoids and superquadrics. Finally applications in various scientific fields will be reported and discussed.

36 pages, 17 figures

References in corpus (11)

• Tetratic Order in the Phase Behavior of a Hard-Rectangle System
• Optimal Packings of Superballs
• Event-Driven Brownian Dynamics for Hard Spheres
• Alpha-Relaxation Processes in Binary Hard-Sphere Mixtures
• Mixing effects for the structural relaxation in binary hard-sphere liquids
• Dense Packings of Superdisks and the Role of Symmetry
• Numerical implementation of the exact dynamics of free rigid bodies
• Dynamics of uniaxial hard ellipsoids
• Slow dynamics in a primitive tetrahedral network model
• Event-Driven Dynamics of Rigid Bodies Interacting via Discretized Potentials
• Molecular Correlation Functions for Uniaxial Ellipsoids in the Isotropic State

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• Hard ellipses: Equation of state, structure and self-diffusion
• Optimizing Event-Driven Simulations
• Observation of Liquid Glass in Molecular Dynamics Simulations
• Measure of distance and overlap between two arbitrary ellipses on a sphere