It remains an open question whether statistical mechanics approaches apply to random packings of athermal particles. Although a jamming phase diagram has recently been proposed for hard spheres with varying friction, here we use a frictionless emulsion system in the presence of depletion forces to sample the available phase space of packing configurations. Using confocal microscopy, we access t...

Canonical-ensemble Monte Carlo simulation and an improved fundamental-measure theory are applied to calculating the structures and chemical potentials of neutral and associating spherical particles confined in rectangular or corrugated microchannels. It is found that the confinement significantly affects the distributions of neutral spheres in the microchannels, especially at high densities or ...

For the last 50 years, the flow of a granular material through an aperture has been intensely studied in gravity-driven vertical systems (e.g., silos and hoppers). Nevertheless, in many industrial applications, grains are horizontally transported at constant velocity, lying on conveyor belts or floating on the surface of flowing liquids. Unlike fluid flows, that are controlled by the pressure, ...

We compared the spatial distribution of short-wavelength-sensitive (SWS or blue) cone photoreceptors in the retinas of eight primate species. The regularity of the SWS cone array was quantified with a statistic (packing factor) that varies between a random distribution (0) and a triangular array (1). We find wide variability among species, with packing factors varying between 0.06 and 0.3. The ...