Inherent Structure Landscape of Hard Spheres Confined to Narrow Cylindrical Channels
arXiv:2108.09286 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.104.064602
Abstract
The inherent structure landscape for a system of hard spheres confined to a hard cylindrical channel, such that spheres can only contact their first and second neighbours, is studied using an analytical model that extends previous results [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 025702 (2015)] to provide a comprehensive picture of jammed packings over a range of packing densities. In the model, a packing is described as an arrangement of helical sections, separated by defects, that have alternating helical twist directions and where all spheres satisfy local jamming constraints. The structure of each helical section is determined by a single helical twist angle, and a jammed packing is obtained by minimizing the length of the channel per particle with respect to the helical section angles. An analysis of a small system of spheres shows that the basins on the inherent structure landscape associated with these helical arrangements split into a number of distinct jammed states separated by low barriers giving rise to a degree of hierarchical organization. The model accurately predicts the geometric properties of packings generated using the Lubachevsky and Stillinger compression scheme () and provides insight into the nature of the probability distribution of helical section lengths.
11 Figures
References in corpus (5)
- Fractal free energy landscapes in structural glasses
- The Statistical Physics of Athermal Materials
- Exact theory of dense amorphous hard spheres in high dimension. I. The free energy
- Understanding the ideal glass transition: Lessons from an equilibrium study of hard disks in a channel
- Densest binary sphere packings and phase diagram : revisited