Disordered Hyperuniform Heterogeneous Materials

TL;DR

This paper establishes rigorous criteria for disordered hyperuniform heterogeneous materials, explores their implications, and provides explicit constructions, advancing understanding and design of novel amorphous materials.

Contribution

It derives new mathematical conditions for hyperuniformity in two-phase media and introduces realizability criteria for spectral densities in such systems.

Findings

Derived new criteria for hyperuniform two-phase materials.

Identified realizable spectral densities and provided explicit examples.

Connected hyperuniformity conditions to microstructural models and patterns.

Abstract

Disordered hyperuniform many-body systems are distinguishable states of matter that lie between a crystal and liquid: they are like perfect crystals in the way they suppress large-scale density fluctuations and yet are like liquids or glasses in that they are statistically isotropic with no Bragg peaks. These systems play a vital role in a number of fundamental and applied problems: glass formation, jamming, rigidity, photonic and electronic band structure, localization of waves and excitations, self-organization, fluid dynamics, quantum systems, and pure mathematics. systems. Here, we derive new rigorous criteria that disordered hyperuniform two-phase heterogeneous materials must obey and explore their consequences. Two-phase heterogeneous media are ubiquitous, examples include composites and porous media, biological media, foams, polymer blends, granular media, cellular solids, and colloids. We rigorously establish the requirements for sphere packings to be "multihyperuniform." We apply realizability conditions for an autocovariance function and its associated spectral density of a two-phase medium, and then incorporate hyperuniformity as a constraint in order to derive new conditions. We show that some functional forms can immediately be eliminated from consideration and identify other forms that are allowable. Specific examples and counterexamples are described. Contact is made with well-known microstructural models as well as irregular phase-separation and Turing-type patterns. We also ascertain a family of spectral densities that are realizable by disordered hyperuniform two-phase media in any space dimension, and present explicit constructions. These studies provide insight into the nature of disordered hyperuniformity in the context of heterogeneous materials and have implications for the design of such novel amorphous materials.