Structures of thin layers of hard spheres : high pressure limit

Abstract

A series of structural transitions was observed in experiments on confinement of colloidal crystals in a wedge : these transitions consist not only of changes in the number of crystalline layers but also of changes in the structure of each layer. To explain the existence of this series, we propose a model of hard-sphere packing where the equilibrium state corresponds to the maximum volume density in the limit of high pressure