Role of Rigidity in the Fluid-Solid Transition

Abstract

We examine the fluid-solid transition for a hard-disk system. By counting the near neighbors in the average configurations of a grand-canonical Monte Carlo simulation, this enables us to relate the thermodynamical transition with the rigidity theory, since we find that the coordination number in the fluid-solid transition is close to the coordination number predicted by a mean field rigidity theory, due to dynamical jamming of particles, where the contact region between disks is the radial ring outside a disk with a maximum allowed coordination number that is not bigger than six . Using these ideas, we were able to produce a continuous glasslike transition when nucleation of rigidity is suppressed.