Most stable structure for hard spheres

Abstract

The hard sphere model is known to show a liquid-solid phase transition, with the solid expected to be either face centered cubic or hexagonal close packed. The difference in free energy between the two structures is very small and various attempts have been made to determine which one is the more stable. We contrast the different approaches and extend one.

5 pages, 1 embedded figure, to appear in Phys Rev E

References in corpus (3)

• Free energies of crystalline solids: a lattice-switch Monte Carlo method
• Stacking Entropy of Hard Sphere Crystals
• The structure of the hard sphere solid

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• Fluid/solid transition in a hard-core system
• Attraction Controls the Inversion of Order by Disorder
• Mode expansion for the density profile of crystal-fluid interfaces: Hard spheres as a test case
• Stable and metastable hard sphere crystals in Fundamental Measure Theory
• Phonon contribution to the entropy of hard sphere crystals
• Three simple scenarios for high-dimensional sphere packings
• A Solidification Phenomenon in Random Packings
• Uniaxial Ordering by Self-Assembly of Isotropic Octahedral Junctions