Measurement of Indeterminacy in Packings of Perfectly Rigid Disks

Static packings of perfectly rigid particles are investigated theoretically and numerically. The problem of finding the contact forces in such packings is formulated mathematically. Letting the values of the contact forces define a vector in a high-dimensional space enable us to show that the set of all possible contact forces is convex, facilitating its numerical exploration. It is also found that the boundary of the set is connected with the presence of sliding contacts, suggesting that a stable packing should not have more than 2M-3N sliding contacts in two dimensions, where M is the number of contacts and N is the number of particles. These results were used to analyze packings generated in different ways by either molecular dynamics or contact dynamics simulations. The dimension of the set of possible forces and the number of sliding contacts agrees with the theoretical expectations. The indeterminacy of each component of the contact forces are found, as well as the an estimate for the diameter of the set of possible contact forces. We also show that contacts with high indeterminacy are located on force chains. The question of whether the simulation methods can represent a packing's memory of its formation is addressed.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Phys Rev

Geometrical relations between space time block code designs and complexity reduction

In this work, the geometric relation between space time block code design for the coherent channel and its non-coherent counterpart is exploited to get an analogue of the information theoretic inequality $I(X;S)\le I((X,H);S)$ in terms of diversity. It provides a lower bound on the performance of non-coherent codes when used in coherent scenarios. This leads in turn to a code design decomposition result splitting coherent code design into two complexity reduced sub tasks. Moreover a geometrical criterion for high performance space time code design is derived.Comment: final version, 11 pages, two-colum

Basic Understanding of Condensed Phases of Matter via Packing Models

Packing problems have been a source of fascination for millenia and their study has produced a rich literature that spans numerous disciplines. Investigations of hard-particle packing models have provided basic insights into the structure and bulk properties of condensed phases of matter, including low-temperature states (e.g., molecular and colloidal liquids, crystals and glasses), multiphase heterogeneous media, granular media, and biological systems. The densest packings are of great interest in pure mathematics, including discrete geometry and number theory. This perspective reviews pertinent theoretical and computational literature concerning the equilibrium, metastable and nonequilibrium packings of hard-particle packings in various Euclidean space dimensions. In the case of jammed packings, emphasis will be placed on the "geometric-structure" approach, which provides a powerful and unified means to quantitatively characterize individual packings via jamming categories and "order" maps. It incorporates extremal jammed states, including the densest packings, maximally random jammed states, and lowest-density jammed structures. Packings of identical spheres, spheres with a size distribution, and nonspherical particles are also surveyed. We close this review by identifying challenges and open questions for future research.Comment: 33 pages, 20 figures, Invited "Perspective" submitted to the Journal of Chemical Physics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1008.298

The isodiametric problem with lattice-point constraints

In this paper, the isodiametric problem for centrally symmetric convex bodies in the Euclidean d-space R^d containing no interior non-zero point of a lattice L is studied. It is shown that the intersection of a suitable ball with the Dirichlet-Voronoi cell of 2L is extremal, i.e., it has minimum diameter among all bodies with the same volume. It is conjectured that these sets are the only extremal bodies, which is proved for all three dimensional and several prominent lattices.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, (v2) referee comments and suggestions incorporated, accepted in Monatshefte fuer Mathemati

Mesh ratios for best-packing and limits of minimal energy configurations

For $N$-point best-packing configurations $\omega_N$ on a compact metric space $(A,\rho)$, we obtain estimates for the mesh-separation ratio $\gamma(\omega_N,A)$, which is the quotient of the covering radius of $\omega_N$ relative to $A$ and the minimum pairwise distance between points in $\omega_N$. For best-packing configurations $\omega_N$ that arise as limits of minimal Riesz $s$-energy configurations as $s\to \infty$, we prove that $\gamma(\omega_N,A)\le 1$ and this bound can be attained even for the sphere. In the particular case when N=5 on $S^2$ with $\rho$ the Euclidean metric, we prove our main result that among the infinitely many 5-point best-packing configurations there is a unique configuration, namely a square-base pyramid $\omega_5^*$, that is the limit (as $s\to \infty$) of 5-point $s$-energy minimizing configurations. Moreover, $\gamma(\omega_5^*,S^2)=1$