Empty Space in Jammed Materials Explains Exotic Universal Structural Features

Salvatore Torquato , a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials at Princeton University, in collaboration with a team of researchers has uncovered universal features in the structures of jammed materials, suggesting a unified method to analyze disparate systems. The findings have implications for research in the areas of quantum systems and cosmology. Their work appears in the April 29 online edition of Physical Review Letters. The researchers describe their work as follows: "Jamming is a fundamental phenomenon in granular matter, biological media, colloids and composite materials in which particles are trapped by their neighbors. Maximally random jammed systems of large numbers of hard particles possess the highest degree of disorder among materials able to resist mechanical stresses. Such systems are therefore prototypical examples of glasses, which are states of matter intermediate between crystals and liquids. "It was previously known that jammed systems of uniform spherical particles possess a unique 'hyperuniformity' property, meaning that fluctuations in the material structure are suppressed over large length scales relative to typical states of bulk matter.