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Application of Edwards' statistical mechanics to high-dimensional jammed sphere packings
Yuliang Jin1, Patrick Charbonneau, Sam Meyer
1Levich Institute and Physics Department, City College of New York, New York, New York 10031, USA.
Abstract:
The isostatic jamming limit of frictionless spherical particles from Edwards' statistical mechanics [Song et al., Nature (London) 453, 629 (2008)] is generalized to arbitrary dimension d using a liquid-state description. The asymptotic high-dimensional behavior of the self-consistent relation is obtained by saddle-point evaluation and checked numerically. The resulting random close packing density scaling ϕ∼d2(-d) is consistent with that of other approaches, such as replica theory and density-functional theory. The validity of various structural approximations is assessed by comparing with three- to six-dimensional isostatic packings obtained from simulations. These numerical results support a growing accuracy of the theoretical approach with dimension. The approach could thus serve as a starting point to obtain a geometrical understanding of the higher-order correlations present in jammed packings.
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