Materials and complexity: emergence of structural complexity in sphere packings

Abstract

The contemporary science of materials and condensed-matter physics is changing in response to a new awareness of the relevance of concepts associated with complexity. Scientists who design and study new materials are confronted by an ever-increasing degree of complexity, both in the materials themselves and in their synthesis. Typically, modern advanced materials are partially non-crystalline, often multicomponent, and form out of equilibrium. Further, they have functional and structural properties that are active over several length-scales. This emerging structural and functional complexity is intrinsic and necessary to many aspects of modern materials; features common also to several other complex systems. In this paper we briefly review the emerging structural complexity in a special model system: sphere packings.