Generating dense packings of hard spheres by soft interaction design
Generating dense packings of hard spheres by soft interaction design
Packing spheres efficiently in large dimension d <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><mml:mi>d</mml:mi></mml:math> is a particularly difficult optimization problem. In this paper we add an isotropic interaction potential to the pure hard-core repulsion, and show that one can tune it in order to maximize a lower bound on the packing density. Our results …