Title: Dense Packings of Nonspherical Particles

Author (Invited): Salvatore Torquato, Princeton University

Abstract:

Understanding the nature of dense particle packings is a subject of intense research in the physical, mathematical and biological sciences. The preponderance of previous studies have focused on spherical shapes, and it is only more recently that nonspherical shapes (e.g., ellipsoids) have been investigated. I describe some recent work that we have done on maximally dense and disordered packings of nonspherical particles of various shapes. Depending on the particular particle shape, the rotational degrees of freedom affect the packing characteristics in distinct ways. This work was done in collaboration with Yang Jiao and Frank Stillinger.