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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The packing of hard particles has fascinated scientists for centuries: from Kepler's conjecture about dense sphere packings, to Hales' experiments on the respiration ability of peas, to Bernal's studies of ball bearings that describe liquid structure. In this talk, I will describe theoretical and computational studies that employ hard-particle models (with purely repulsive contact interactions) to describe: 1) the variation of the number of interparticle contacts in packings of frictional spheres, 2) the glass-forming ability of bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), and 3) the side chain conformations of hydrophobic residues in protein cores.
While it may be obvious that hard-particle models are able to quantitatively describe static packings of macroscopic grains, it may be a surprise that hard-particle models can be used to design new BMGs and can be employed to predict side chain conformations in protein cores. I will show that in these three disparate systems the hard-particle model provides key physical insights that are obscured with more complex models.
