Paper detail

Hidden symmetries in jammed systems

There are deep, but hidden, geometric structures within jammed systems, associated with hidden symmetries. These can be revealed by repeated transformations under which these structures lead to fixed points. These geometric structures can be found in the Voronoi tesselation of space defined by the packing. In this paper we examine two iterative processes: maximum inscribed sphere (MIS) inversion and a real-space coarsening scheme. Under repeated iterations of the MIS inversion process we find invariant systems in which every particle is equal to the maximum inscribed sphere within its Voronoi cell. Using a real-space coarsening scheme we reveal behavior in geometric order parameters which is length-scale invariant.