Do Binary Hard Disks Exhibit an Ideal Glass Transition?

A. Donev, F. H. Stillinger, S. Torquato

Published 2006-03-07Version 1

We demonstrate that there is no ideal glass transition in a binary hard-disk mixture by explicitly constructing an exponential number of jammed packings with densities spanning the spectrum from the accepted ``amorphous'' glassy state to the phase-separated crystal. Thus the configurational entropy cannot be zero for an ideal amorphous glass, presumed distinct from the crystal in numerous theoretical and numerical estimates in the literature. This objection parallels our previous critique of the idea that there is a most-dense random (close) packing for hard spheres [Torquato et al, Phys. Rev. Lett., 84, 2064 (2000)].