Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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DY: Fachverband Dynamik und Statistische Physik

DY 18: Granular Matter / Contact Dynamics

DY 18.10: Talk

Wednesday, April 2, 2014, 12:00–12:15, ZEU 118

MC-Simulation of Packings of Regular Tetrahedra — •Lukas Zwirner and Eckard Specht — Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg, Institut für Experimentelle Physik/Materialphysik

The problem of packing tetrahedra attracted much interest recently. For regular tetrahedra the densest known packing has a packing fraction of φ ≈ 0.8563. It is a periodic packing of double dimers (Chen et al., Discrete Comput. Geom. 44, p. 253 (2010)).

However, searching for a high packing fraction is not the only topic of interest, e. g. the wide field of quasi-crystals or behavior of granular matter are subject of current research.

We investigate the problem of packing identical, regular tetrahedra numerically by a pure geometrical approach. Hence, there is neither friction nor torques. The Monte-Carlo-method is applied to generate packings of regular tetrahedra using different protocols.

The packings are investigated with regard to their spatial structure (pair correlation function), their pairwise orientation and face-normal correlation.