Fluid-solid transition in a hard-core system.
We prove that a system of particles in the plane, interacting only with a certain hard-core constraint, undergoes a fluid-solid phase transition.
Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Charles Radin.
We prove that a system of particles in the plane, interacting only with a certain hard-core constraint, undergoes a fluid-solid phase transition.
The hard sphere model is known to show a liquid-solid phase transition, with the solid expected to be either face centered cubic or hexagonal close packed. The differences in free energy of the two structures are very small and various attempts have been made to determine which structure is the more stable. We contrast the different approaches and extend one.
We show that near densest packing the perturbations of the hexagonal close packed (hcp) structure yield higher entropy than perturbations of any other densest packing. The difference between the various structures shows up in the correlations between motions of nearest neighbors. In the hcp structure random motion of each sphere impinges slightly less on the motion of its nearest neighbors than in the other structures.