Packing fraction of crystalline structures of binary hard spheres : a general equation and application to amorphization

In a previous paper analytical equations were derived for the packing fraction of crystalline structures consisting of bimodal randomly placed hard spheres [H. J. H. Brouwers, Phys. Rev. E 76, 041304 (2007)]. The bimodal packing fraction was derived for the three crystalline cubic systems: viz., face-centered cubic, body-centered cubic, and simple cubic. These three equations appeared also to be applicable to all 14 Bravais lattices. Here it is demonstrated, accounting for the number of distorted bonds in the building blocks and using graph theory, that one general packing equation can be derived, valid again for all lattices. This expression is validated and applied to the process of amorphization