Is random close packing of spheres well defined?

By Torquato, Thomas M Truskett, Debenedetti. Physical Review Letters, 2000

1,169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 random jammed state, which can be made precise.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Condensed Matter Physics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b6f372dbfc9d888eee87a40f422f013c432b4c3

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In Biomedical Engineering

In Condensed Matter Physics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

Relationship between packing structure and porosity in fixed beds of equilateral cylindrical particles (2006, methodology): “Torquato et al. (2000) studied jammed packings over a range of packing densities, and reported a steady increase in the parameter Q(,/ <2? c , which quantifies the local bond-orientational order as compared to a perfect fee crystal.”
Size separation in vibrated granular matter (2004, background): “(The grains are considered to be randomly packed, although it is a density that is not precisely defined [43].”
FLUID MECHANICS AND RHEOLOGY OF DENSE SUSPENSIONS (2001, background): “By considering different geometric arrangements of monomodal spheres, a range of theoretical values for φm can be obtained, from the simple cubic value of 0.524 to the hexagonal closepacked value of 0.740 (Torquato et al. 2000).”
Jammed hard-particle packings: From Kepler to Bernal and beyond (2010, methodology): “Observe that irregular jammed packings can be created in the entire non-trivial range of packing fraction 0.64 < φ < 0.74048 . . . (Kansal et al., 2002b; Torquato et al., 2000) using the LS algorithm.”
The Physics of Protoplanetesimal Dust Agglomerates. I. Mechanical Properties and Relations to Primitive Bodies in the Solar System (2006, methodology): “For RCP, the packing density is ¼ 0:635 (see, e.g., Onoda & Liniger 1990; Torquato et al. 2000).”
Confocal microscopy of colloids (2007, background): “64 [18–21], often termed RCP for ‘random close packing’ (see figure 1).”
Hyperuniformity in point patterns and two-phase random heterogeneous media (2009, background): “This behavior is in contrast to those of other orientational and translational metrics [43, 44], which in three dimensions arbitrarily define the FCC lattice as the standard of perfect spatial ordering.”