Packing, geometry & entropy: unexpected crystallization of mixtures of spheres of two sizes in spherical confinement.
How particles pack under different constraints is not only of fundamental interest to physics, chemistry and materials science, but also to mathematics. A team of researchers has now shown that mixing particles of two different sizes inside a sphere results in unexpected, cubic structures, as they describe today in a publication in Nature Physics. These findings do not only lead to new fundamental insights into packing and crystallization under frustration, but may also form a basis for the construction of photonic crystals with new properties. Read more here.
