The main purpose of this paper is to discuss how firm or steady certain known ball packing are, thinking of them as structures. This is closely related to the property of being locally maximally dense. Among other things we show that many of the usual best-known candidates, for the most dense packings with congruent spherical balls, have the property of being uniformly stable, i.e., for a suffi...

Particle shape plays a crucial role in determining packing characteristics. Real particles in nature usually have rounded corners. In this work, we systematically investigate the rounded corner effect on the dense packings of spherotetrahedral particles. The evolution of dense packing structure as the particle shape continuously deforms from a regular tetrahedron to a sphere is investigated, st...

Although the concept of random close packing with an almost universal packing fraction of approximately 0.64 for hard spheres was introduced more than half a century ago, there are still ongoing debates. The main difficulty in searching the densest packing is that states with packing fractions beyond the glass transition at approximately 0.58 are inherently non-equilibrium systems, where the dy...

We propose a general framework to study constructions of Euclidean lattices from linear codes over finite fields. In particular, we prove general conditions for an ensemble constructed using linear codes to contain dense lattices (i.e., with packing density comparable to the Minkowski-Hlawka lower bound). Specializing to number field lattices, we obtain a number of interesting corollaries for i...

Understanding the nature of dense particle packings is a subject of intense research in the physical, mathematical, and biological sciences. The preponderance of previous work has focused on spherical particles and very little is known about dense polyhedral packings. We formulate the problem of generating dense packings of nonoverlapping, nontiling polyhedra within an adaptive fundamental cell...

We have formulated the problem of generating dense packings of nonoverlapping, nontiling nonspherical particles within an adaptive fundamental cell subject to periodic boundary conditions as an optimization problem called the adaptive-shrinking cell (ASC) formulation [S. Torquato and Y. Jiao, Phys. Rev. E 80, 041104 (2009)]. Because the objective function and impenetrability constraints can be ...

The dense packing of hard objects is a recurrent paradigm in physics, for example in early models of crystallinity, and also in theories of granular materials which are under active debate today [1, 2]. Generally speaking the objects are taken to be spheres, leading to the formulation of the Kepler Problem (what is their closest packing?) and the investigations begun by Bernal on disordered pac...