2011/01/31 by Ning Xu, Daan Frenkel, Andrea J. Liu · 63 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #Atomic packing factor #Computer science #Configuration space #Data mining #Entropy (arrow of time) #Hard spheres #Material Dynamics and Properties #Mathematical analysis #Mathematics #Maxima and minima #Measure (data warehouse) #Monte Carlo method #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #SPHERES #Statistical physics #Statistics #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.106.245502
published in Physical Review Letters 106(24), 245502 (American Physical Society) · 4 pages, 4 figures
openalex publication_date 2011/06/17 · arxiv created 2011/06/28 · arxiv updated 2015/03/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
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.