Geometrical frustration: a study of four-dimensional hard spheres.

dc.contributor.author

van Meel, JA

dc.contributor.author

Frenkel, D

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Charbonneau, P

dc.coverage.spatial

United States

dc.date.accessioned

2016-08-03T13:42:59Z

dc.date.issued

2009-03

dc.description.abstract

The smallest maximum-kissing-number Voronoi polyhedron of three-dimensional (3D) Euclidean spheres is the icosahedron, and the tetrahedron is the smallest volume that can show up in Delaunay tessellation. No periodic lattice is consistent with either, and hence these dense packings are geometrically frustrated. Because icosahedra can be assembled from almost perfect tetrahedra, the terms "icosahedral" and "polytetrahedral" packing are often used interchangeably, which leaves the true origin of geometric frustration unclear. Here we report a computational study of freezing of 4D Euclidean hard spheres, where the densest Voronoi cluster is compatible with the symmetry of the densest crystal, while polytetrahedral order is not. We observe that, under otherwise comparable conditions, crystal nucleation in four dimensions is less facile than in three dimensions, which is consistent with earlier observations [M. Skoge, Phys. Rev. E 74, 041127 (2006)]. We conclude that it is the geometrical frustration of polytetrahedral structures that inhibits crystallization.

dc.identifier

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19391883

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1539-3755

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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/12592

dc.language

eng

dc.publisher

American Physical Society (APS)

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Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys

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10.1103/PhysRevE.79.030201

dc.title

Geometrical frustration: a study of four-dimensional hard spheres.

dc.type

Journal article

duke.contributor.orcid

Charbonneau, P|0000-0001-7174-0821

pubs.author-url

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19391883

pubs.begin-page

030201

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3 Pt 1

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Chemistry

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Duke

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Physics

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Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

pubs.publication-status

Published

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79

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