Geometrical Frustration and Static Correlations in Hard-Sphere Glass Formers

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structural properties of hard-sphere fluids to understand geometrical frustration in glass formation, revealing dimension-dependent order and modest correlation growth in accessible regimes.

Contribution

It provides an analytical and numerical analysis of geometrical frustration and static correlations, highlighting their dimension dependence and limited growth in dynamical regimes.

Findings

Generalized polytetrahedral order increases with packing fraction in low dimensions.

Structural correlations grow modestly in accessible dynamical regimes.

Order becomes less relevant as dimension increases.

Abstract

We analytically and numerically characterize the structure of hard-sphere fluids in order to review various geometrical frustration scenarios of the glass transition. We find generalized polytetrahedral order to be correlated with increasing fluid packing fraction, but to become increasingly irrelevant with increasing dimension. We also find the growth in structural correlations to be modest in the dynamical regime accessible to computer simulations.