A theory of amorphous packings of binary mixtures of hard spheres

TL;DR

This paper extends a theoretical framework for amorphous packings of hard spheres to binary and multicomponent mixtures, successfully matching experimental and numerical data on structural properties.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized theory for amorphous packings in multicomponent systems, linking experimental and numerical results with the infinite pressure limit of glassy states.

Findings

The theory accurately predicts packing fraction variations with mixture composition.

The theory reproduces partial coordination numbers observed in experiments.

The approach validates the assumption that amorphous packings correspond to metastable glassy states.

Abstract

We extend our theory of amorphous packings of hard spheres to binary mixtures and more generally to multicomponent systems. The theory is based on the assumption that amorphous packings produced by typical experimental or numerical protocols can be identified with the infinite pressure limit of long lived metastable glassy states. We test this assumption against numerical and experimental data and show that the theory correctly reproduces the variation with mixture composition of structural observables, such as the total packing fraction and the partial coordination numbers.