Sommaire:

Hard spheres are the simplest statistical mechanical model to describe particulate systems, such as atoms, colloids, and grains. Despite its simplicity, this model shows a rich phenomenology when compressed beyond the freezing point. Several scenarios have been proposed to describe the nature of arrested amorphous states at large densities, where both a glass transition (in colloidal systems) and a jamming transition (in granular systems) are observed. So far, however, none of these scenarios could be tested explicitly, because both experiments and computer simulations failed to thermalize the system in the density range where both transitions occur. Recently, we implemented a very efficient simulation algorithm that enabled us to thermalize systems of polydisperse hard spheres at unprecedently high densities, surpassing both experiments and previous simulations by several orders of magnitude. Here we use these numerical advances to demonstrate that the jamming transition cannot be the ultimate fate of dense hard spheres, and that a thermodynamic glass transition cannot be ruled out.

Ref.: "Equilibrium sampling of hard spheres up to the jamming density and beyond ", Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 238002 (2016)

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