Percolation of hard disks

Random arrangements of points in the plane, interacting only through a simple hard core exclusion, are considered. An intensity parameter controls the average density of arrangements, in analogy with the Poisson point process. It is proved that at high intensity, an infinite connected cluster of excluded volume appears with positive probability.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Connectedness percolation of hard convex polygonal rods and platelets

The properties of polymer composites with nanofiller particles change drastically above a critical filler density known as the percolation threshold. Real nanofillers, such as graphene flakes and cellulose nanocrystals, are not idealized disks and rods but are often modeled as such. Here we investigate the effect of the shape of the particle cross section on the geometric percolation threshold. Using connectedness percolation theory and the second-virial approximation, we analytically calculate the percolation threshold of hard convex particles in terms of three single-particle measures. We apply this method to polygonal rods and platelets and find that the universal scaling of the percolation threshold is lowered by decreasing the number of sides of the particle cross section. This is caused by the increase of the surface area to volume ratio with decreasing number of sides.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures; added references, corrected typo, results unchange

Granular Collapse as a Percolation Transition

Inelastic collapse is found in a two-dimensional system of inelastic hard disks confined between two walls which act as an energy source. As the coefficient of restitution is lowered, there is a transition between a state containing small collapsed clusters and a state dominated by a large collapsed cluster. The transition is analogous to that of a percolation transition. At the transition the number of clusters n_s of size s scales as $n_s \sim s^{-\tau}$ with $\tau \approx 2.7$.Comment: 10 pages revtex, 5 figures, accepted by Phys Rev E many changes and corrections from previous submissio

Connectivity percolation in suspensions of hard platelets

We present a study on connectivity percolation in suspensions of hard platelets by means of Monte Carlo simulation. We interpret our results using a contact-volume argument based on an effective single--particle cell model. It is commonly assumed that the percolation threshold of anisotropic objects scales as their inverse aspect ratio. While this rule has been shown to hold for rod-like particles, we find that for hard plate-like particles the percolation threshold is non-monotonic in the aspect ratio. It exhibits a shallow minimum at intermediate aspect ratios and then saturates to a constant value. This effect is caused by the isotropic-nematic transition pre-empting the percolation transition. Hence the common strategy to use highly anisotropic, conductive particles as fillers in composite materials in order to produce conduction at low filler concentration is expected to fail for plate-like fillers such as graphene and graphite nanoplatelets

Transport, Geometrical and Topological Properties of Stealthy Disordered Hyperuniform Two-Phase Systems

Disordered hyperuniform many-particle systems have attracted considerable recent attention. One important class of such systems is the classical ground states of "stealthy potentials." The degree of order of such ground states depends on a tuning parameter. Previous studies have shown that these ground-state point configurations can be counterintuitively disordered, infinitely degenerate, and endowed with novel physical properties (e.g., negative thermal expansion behavior). In this paper, we focus on the disordered regime in which there is no long-range order, and control the degree of short-range order. We map these stealthy disordered hyperuniform point configurations to two-phase media by circumscribing each point with a possibly overlapping sphere of a common radius $a$: the "particle" and "void" phases are taken to be the space interior and exterior to the spheres, respectively. We study certain transport properties of these systems, including the effective diffusion coefficient of point particles diffusing in the void phase as well as static and time-dependent characteristics associated with diffusion-controlled reactions. Besides these effective transport properties, we also investigate several related structural properties, including pore-size functions, quantizer error, an order metric, and percolation threshold. We show that these transport, geometrical and topological properties of our two-phase media derived from decorated stealthy ground states are distinctly different from those of equilibrium hard-sphere systems and spatially uncorrelated overlapping spheres