Generating dense packings of hard spheres by soft interaction design

Packing spheres efficiently in large dimension d d is a particularly difficult optimization problem. In this paper we add an isotropic interaction potential to the pure hard-core repulsion, and show that one can tune it in order to maximize a lower bound on the packing density. Our results suggest that exponentially many (in the number of particles) distinct disordered sphere packings can be efficiently constructed by this method, up to a packing fraction close to 7 \, d \, 2^{-d} 7 d 2 − d . The latter is determined by solving the inverse problem of maximizing the dynamical glass transition over the space of the interaction potentials. Our method crucially exploits a recent exact formulation of the thermodynamics and the dynamics of simple liquids in infinite dimension.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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