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Updated: Aug 23, 2026

Preparation and Delivery of Protein Microcrystals in Lipidic Cubic Phase for Serial Femtosecond Crystallography
Published on: September 20, 2016
Unusually dense crystal packings of ellipsoids
Aleksandar Donev1, Frank H Stillinger, P M Chaikin
1Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
Abstract:
In this Letter, we report on the densest-known packings of congruent ellipsoids. The family of new packings consists of crystal arrangements of spheroids with a wide range of aspect ratios, and with density phi always surpassing that of the densest Bravais lattice packing phi approximately equal to 0.7405. A remarkable maximum density of phi approximately equal to 0.7707 is achieved for maximal aspect ratios larger than sqrt[3], when each ellipsoid has 14 touching neighbors. Our results are directly relevant to understanding the equilibrium behavior of systems of hard ellipsoids, and, in particular, the solid and glassy phases.
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