Jammed hard-particle packings: From Kepler to Bernal and beyond

Understanding the characteristics of jammed particle packings provides basic insights into the structure and bulk properties of crystals, glasses, and granular media and into selected aspects of biological systems. This review describes the diversity of jammed configurations attainable by frictionless convex nonoverlapping (hard) particles in Euclidean spaces and for that purpose it stresses individual-packing geometric analysis. A fundamental feature of that diversity is the necessity to classify individual jammed configurations according to whether they are locally, collectively, or strictly jammed. Each of these categories contains a multitude of jammed configurations spanning a wide and (in the large…