Direct Determination of the Size of Basins of Attraction of Jammed Solids

Ning Xu, Daan Frenkel, and Andrea J. Liu
Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 245502 – Published 17 June 2011

Abstract

We propose a free-energy-based Monte Carlo method to measure the volume of potential-energy basins in configuration space. Using this approach we can estimate the number of distinct potential-energy minima, even when this number is much too large to be sampled directly. We validate our approach by comparing our results with the direct enumeration of distinct jammed states in small packings of frictionless spheres. We find that the entropy of distinct packings is extensive and that the entropy of distinct hard-sphere packings must have a maximum as a function of packing fraction.

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  • Received 31 January 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.245502

© 2011 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Ning Xu1, Daan Frenkel2,3, and Andrea J. Liu4

  • 1CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, People’s Republic of China
  • 2Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1EW, United Kingdom
  • 3FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics, Kruislaan 407, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • 4Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA

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Issue

Vol. 106, Iss. 24 — 17 June 2011

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