Charles Maher, Princeton University | Advanced Materials

Superballs Two Ways: This piece demonstrates the complex, disordered structures that can arise from simple principles. Specifically, these are illustrative packings of an exotic state of superballs (deformed spheres) produced simply by rapidly increasing their size in a fixed periodic simulation box. This exotic state is the “maximally random jammed state,” which is disordered, mechanically rigid, and has several unique physical properties that are not typical of garden-variety disordered systems. The original figure was produced for a publication funded by the AFOSR about the characterization of the structure and transport properties of maximally random jammed packings of superballs, which are a family of deformations of the sphere (Charles Emmett Maher, Frank H. Stillinger, and Salvatore Torquato Phys. Rev. Materials 6, 025603). Contributors: Charles E. Maher, Frank H. Stillinger, Salvatore Torquato