Intrinsic structural features in jammed disordered packing of monodisperse spheres

TL;DR

This study introduces a tetrahedral structural model to analyze jammed disordered packings of monodisperse spheres, revealing intrinsic features dependent solely on packing fraction and highlighting the significance of irregular simplexes in density increase.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel tetrahedral structure model that systematically characterizes jammed disordered packings, emphasizing the role of irregular simplexes in packing density.

Findings

Intrinsic structure features depend only on packing fraction.

Crystal phase configurations are more prevalent than frustrated ones.

Irregular simplexes contribute more to density increase than regular simplexes.

Abstract

A new tetrahedral structure model was developed and the geometrical structure of jammed disordered packings of monodisperse spheres with different friction coefficients was systematically characterized. An intrinsic structure feature is revealed for all jammed disordered packings, which is determined only by the packing fraction, independent of interparticle friction. Moreover, the structural configurations associated with crystal phases are more prevalent than the geometric frustrated ones. In addition, irregular simplexes are found to play a key role in an increase in density, rather than regular simplexes, in contrast to previous expectation. Our model provides an intrinsic structural basis for the random close packing.