Hard-Sphere Jamming through the Lens of Linear Optimization

TL;DR

This paper introduces CALiPPSO, a linear optimization algorithm that efficiently generates jammed hard-sphere packings across dimensions, providing insights into the jamming transition and its critical properties.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel linear optimization approach for hard-sphere jamming, enabling the study of jammed states without effective potentials and establishing a link to mean-field theory.

Findings

CALiPPSO produces jammed packings in arbitrary dimensions.

Packings generated are always isostatic and mechanically stable.

Numerical results agree qualitatively with mean-field predictions.

Abstract

The jamming transition is ubiquitous. It is present in granular matter, colloids, glasses, and many other systems. Yet, it defines a critical point whose properties still need to be fully understood. A major breakthrough came about when the replica formalism was extended to build a mean-field theory that provides an exact description of the jamming transition of spherical particles in the infinite-dimensional limit. While such theory explains the jamming critical behavior of both soft and hard spheres, investigating the transition in finite-dimensional systems poses very difficult and different problems, in particular from the numerical point of view. Soft particles are modeled by continuous potentials; thus, their jamming point can be reached through efficient energy minimization algorithms. In contrast, the latter methods are inapplicable to hard-sphere (HS) systems since the interaction energy among the particles is always zero by construction. To overcome these difficulties, here we recast the jamming of hard spheres as a constrained optimization problem and introduce the CALiPPSO algorithm, capable of readily producing jammed HS packings without including any effective potential. This algorithm brings a HS configuration of arbitrary dimensions to its jamming point by solving a chain of linear optimization problems. We show that there is a strict correspondence between the force balance conditions of jammed packings and the properties of the optimal solutions of CALiPPSO, whence we prove analytically that our packings are always isostatic and in mechanical equilibrium. Furthermore, using extensive numerical simulations, we show that our algorithm is able to probe the complex structure of the free-energy landscape, finding qualitative agreement with mean-field predictions. We also characterize the algorithmic complexity of CALiPPSO and provide an open-source implementation of it.